Why to set the bar high for politicians

  Each time the sun comes up, bloggers try their best to analyze the political events of the day.  Like academics and magazine editors, we have the luxury of being wrong from time to time.  Politicians, on the other hand, are much more important.  They conduct oversight and pass laws that affect real lives.  And when they screw up, it is our job to let them know and vote them out of office.

One particular New York Times columnist who originally supported the decision to invade Iraq now suspects why writers like himself were so naive.  He thinks it all had to do with the traditional media's inability to distinguish interesting theories from fact:

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once said that the trouble with academicsand commentators is that they care more about whether ideas areinteresting than whether they are true. Politicians live by ideas justas much as professional thinkers do, but they can’t afford the luxuryof entertaining ideas that are merely interesting. They have to workwith the small number of ideas that happen to be true and the evensmaller number that happen to be applicable to real life. In academiclife, false ideas are merely false and useless ones can be fun to playwith. In political life, false ideas can ruin the lives of millions anduseless ones can waste precious resources. An intellectual’sresponsibility for his ideas is to follow their consequences whereverthey may lead. A politician’s responsibility is to master thoseconsequences and prevent them from doing harm.

Okay -- we all agree that because the media was carelessly lazy it became much easier for the Bush Administration to sell the war.  But in the end, it was George W. Bush who made the decision to invade.  Instead of being a pragmatist and considering consequence before taking action, Bush behaved like a magazine editor and embraced a particular theory because it sounded interesting.

Maybe this tragedy is something to keep in mind when selecting our next president.