Down the memory hole

Bush would find it really convenient if he could deep-six the notion that he and toxic Jack Abramoff were associates. Well, as any member of the faith-based community * does when he finds that the facts are inconsistent with the desired reality, he just makes up new ones that fit better. Kinda like a four-year old... no that's not fair... to four-year olds.

As good old Josh Marshall says...

Sometimes the symbols of reality obscure reality. Whether there are one or five or a hundred pictures of President Bush and Jack Abramoff is really beside the point. What is the point is this line from President Bush from yesterday's press conference: "You know, I, frankly, don't even remember having my picture taken with the guy. I don't know him."

Even discounting for the inherent squishiness of the language, that's just a lie.

Doesn't know him? Please. Like most successful politicians President Bush has a knack for remembering names and faces. On top of that, well ... let's set aside the fact that Abramoff was apparently a frequent attendee at White House staff planning meetings, seeded the administration with a bunch of his former employees, and so forth.

Let's just focus on a few key facts.

For the first three years of Bush's presidency Abramoff was arguably the most wired Republican lobbyist in Washington.

Bush doesn't know him?

Abramoff was a long time associate of one of the president's top political advisors, Grover Norquist and his chief political guru Karl Rove.

Bush never made his acquaintance?

Every Republican power player in Washington knew Jack Abramoff. Many of them knew him very, very well. But President Bush never knew him? Their paths never crossed?

That is simply ridiculous.

What's more, everyone asking the questions knows it's ridiculous. The problem is that absent a 2+2=5 type statement they fon't feel comfortable calling the president out as a liar.

Pictures in themselves don't mean much. There are pictures of the president with people he knew far less well than Jack Abramoff, people he really never knew at all. But when those pictures of Abramoff and the president slip into public view, the lie will simply become unsustainable. They know that.

And that's why the White House is turning the city upside down doing everything in its power to insure they never see the light of day.

* Who can forget this bit from The Price of Loyalty, Ron Suskind's book about Paul O'Neill:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''