Cognitive dissonance

Anonymous Liberal has posted an article at Glenn Greenwald's Unclaimed Territory that addresses a favourite subject of mine: how people can keep two mutually exclusive concepts in their minds at the same time. A.L. makes the case that the media does this far too often and, in doing so, allows the Bush administration to get away with their inconsistencies, lies and hypcrisy.

the natural consequence of this phenomenon is that politicians are able get away with making statements and arguments in one context than are entirely inconsistent with the statements and arguments they are simultaneously making in another.

There is no better example of this phenomenon at work than the media's recent coverage of the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy and the simultaneous push on Capitol Hill to renew the Patriot Act. Both of these stories have garnered a significant amount of press coverage over the last few months, but, for the most part, the media has elected to treat them as if they have nothing to do with one another.

[...]

These statements [by Bush in support of renewed Patriot Act]--while unremarkable in a universe where the president isn't openly flaunting this very law--are entirely incoherent in the universe we actually inhabit, where the president has admitted that his administration is currently engaged in the very type of surveillance that FISA explicitly criminalizes. After all, if some combination of the AUMF and Article II bestow the president with the power to disregard FISA--as the administration and its defenders claim--then, by definition, the amendments to FISA contained in the Patriot Act are clearly not "vital to the war on terror." Indeed, they're entirely superfluous.

Similarly, it makes absolutely no sense to say that the Patriot Act/FISA "safeguard[s] the civil liberties of the American people" when the administration is claiming that it is not bound by FISA's provisions. Because both the Post and the Times insist on covering the Patriot Act renewal and the NSA controversy as if they were totally unrelated stories, both papers simply present Bush's incoherent statements without further comment.

This is similar to something I have said before

But what is really bizarre (in that old logically inconsistent way) is that the Rethuglicans are arguing that the President... er, Commander-in-Chief, has unlimited powers anyway because we're at war, you know... the war-on-terror, and their justification was Congress authorizing the invasion of Afghanistan. It would seem to me that if they really thought that the President had these unlimited powers, they wouldn't have to get Congress to grant him additional powers via the Patriot Act. Does not the requesting of additional powers imply the requester knows that he doesn't have them?