The evil genius

Tony Blankley notes the incoherence of the theory that President Bush deceived the world into thinking Iraq had chemical and biological weapons that it did not really possess. Among other things, Blankley points to the following inconsistency in the thinking of the proponents of such a theory — the same people who have long accused the president of being a simpleton now portray him as “the devious mastermind of a mind-bogglingly complex plot” that deceived not only foreign intelligence services and the U.N. Security Council’s inspectors, but also our own government bureaucracy.
This tension in the thinking of Bush’s severest critics has long been present. I recall attending a Passover seder in the spring of 2001 where an acquaintance was claiming that certain innocuous proposals from Bush’s domestic agenda were actually part of an elaborate conspiracy to end government regulation as we know it, all for the benefit of the oil companies. The speaker did not know anything about my political views (at Jewish functions in the Washington, D.C. area it is commonly assumed that everyone present is a liberal Democrat). This enabled me to remark, in an innocent sounding way, that Bush sounded like an evil genius. The speaker, missing the irony, responded “well, I don’t agree with the genius part.”