Historical Comment

President Bush and Vice-President Cheney have spent much of the past few months attempting to re-write the history of their administration. They've been proven wrong on so many of their statements that you'd think they'd be embarrassed in being caught in such bald-faced lies given all the evidence (much of it video tapes of statements they now claim never to have made) offered by those with more accurate memories.

What seems clear to me is that their intentions are not to convince a contemporary audience (well, except maybe for that tiny segment that still thinks they've done a good job) so much as future generations. That is, they are engaging in a little historical ploy that is associated with discredited ideas, notably in recent years the holocaust deniers. The idea is to generate enough "debate" about the issue in the present so that a hundred years or so down the line historians will evaluate the debate itself as evidence of a legitimate difference of opinion, thereby validating the lie. As other evidence becomes more obscure, or even disappears (will future generations retain the technology to view video tapes? who knows?) the interpretive nature of the discipline will open the door to false conclusions.

So it's important that these efforts at revisionism be quashed now, in the present, so that Bush does not back his way into the future favorable evaluation he so desperately craves.