Recently, Katie Couric asserted that everyone in the audience at the National Press Club with her thinks that Bush lied, so people died:

“Everyone in this room would agree that people in this country were misled in terms of the rationale of this war,” said Couric, adding that it is “pretty much accepted” that the war in Iraq was a mistake.

When people accuse the media of having a liberal bias, this is what they mean. It is Couric’s default position—and her colleagues’ default position, she says—that the Bush administration acted in bad faith in deposing Saddam. That is the “liberal” position she parrots—that Bush lied us into war in order to secure his reelection in 2004. Why, Frank Rich wrote a book about it, so it must be true.

I put “liberal” in quote marks because there is in fact nothing liberal about this position. Indeed, it requires an unusual degree of cynicism and detachment—some might called it a deranged detachment—from reality to actually believe this, if you really think about it. Which, I suspect, most people who claim to hold this view haven’t done, because most people don’t think politically: that is to say, they have opinions, but they don’t spend a lot of time thinking about their positions (see Louis Menand on Bryan Caplan)

Because if you say that Bush acted in bad faith (by “misleading” us into war), you are also saying that the president of the United States deliberately took us into war heedless of the potential disaster both to Iraq and to America. I understand that this position is usually spouted by people who also think that Bush is stupid or following God’s orders or under the control of evil neocons who want to make the world safe for Israel—all the more reason to consider them perversely detached from reality, as far as I’m concerned. But that’s not my point. My point is that if you seriously believe this—that Bush lied and that he lied us into war purely for his party’s political benefit—then it is incumbent on you to persuade me, first, that a president would actually do this. And no matter what you say to me—even if you remind me of, say, Richard Nixon’s evil “Jew count,” which is about as creepy as a president can get—I’m going to tell you to get a goddamn grip, because you may think it’s oh-so-sophisticated to be of this view, but what it really is, is ignorant and embarrassing.

Back to Couric. Having established that all of her colleagues in the room are ill-informed and detached “liberals” like her, she then goes on to admit an ignorance and incuriosity so complete that since 2003, she has never even tried to understand the Bush administration’s case for war:

“I’ve never understood why [invading Iraq] was so high on the administration’s agenda when terrorism was going on in Afghanistan and Pakistan and that [Iraq] had no true connection with al Qaeda.”

Couric continues to enumerate the now familiar talking points:

Further, Couric said the Bush administration botched the war effort, calling it “accepted truths” that it erred by “disbanding the Iraq military, and leaving 100,000 Sunni men feeling marginalized and angry…[and] whether there were enough boots on the ground, the feeling that we’d be welcomed as liberators and didn’t need to focus as much on security.”

Here’s the kicker: she envisions a time when she may be called upon to admit to these brave but dangerous ideas in front of a camera, and she courageously volunteers to do it.

She added “I’d feel totally comfortable saying any of that at some point, if required, on television.”

She is a total embarrassment to her profession. I don’t know which is more humiliating—her claim to speak the undisputed truth that “everyone knows” or her belief that she might be called upon to testify in a future HUAC.

Listen up: I’m a big Leonard Cohen fan too. I agree that

… everybody knows that the plague is coming
Everybody knows that its moving fast
Everybody knows that the naked man and woman
Are just a shining artifact of the past
Everybody knows the scene is dead
But theres gonna be a meter on your bed
That will disclose
What everybody knows

But until that plague comes, when I happen to be home at 6:30 and feel like watching a news show, I’ll be tuning in to Charlie Gibson, who’s a grown-up.