What Bush knows

Over at Raw Story John Steinberg puts forward a plausible analysis of the frightening inner workings of Bush's mind:

...Post-Enlightenment folks tend to think of knowledge as an empirical thing: knowledge is the product of evidence that comports with a theory or world view. As such, we seek data, and when the data are inconclusive or inconsistent with expectation, we admit that we don’t know.

That, I submit, is not what George Bush means when he says he knows something. He knew Karl Rove was innocent in the same way he knew that there were WMDs in Iraq, and that Osama got birthday cards from Saddam. More to the point, he knew it the way he knew God wanted him to be president.

In other words, he knows Rove is blameless in the way he knows his religious beliefs are true—based not upon a survey of facts, evidence and expertise, but upon an inventory of only the desolate, monochromatic landscape of his own interior...