The Sgt Schultz Defense

To my surprise, Arianna Huffington and the Huffington Post are rapidly becoming daily 'must reads' for me. The news judgment shown in the Post articles, and Huffington's own writing, are both pretty impressive.
Here's her latest -- The New Know-Nothings:

There's an old saying that when the facts are against you, argue the law. But the Bushies have gone one better: when the facts are against them, they argue the very existence of facts. As pretty much every fact has turned against the administration in Iraq, the fallback position has increasingly become: well, who can really know anything? Everything is so complex. You've got Sunnis, you've got Shiites, you've got Kurds...the truth is...well, the truth is that we can't know the truth...so how can we be held accountable when nothing is really knowable? . . . while Rumsfeld and his chums claim that nothing concrete is really knowable, they are -- somehow -- sure that we are winning. It's just that any fact or statistic that might disprove this assertion is dismissed as invalid in a complex, postmodern world. But if you set all facts aside, you will be totally certain that we're making progress. Looking back, it's fascinating how sure they were back when they were lying about WMD. Then it was all about solid facts, and aluminum tubes, and Tenet saying "slam dunk" and Cheney saying "no doubt." But now that all that has vanished, so too, it seems, has our ability to know anything about anything. Bush claims he's going back to his ranch after his presidency, but perhaps a Distinguished Chair in Postmodernist Theory at an Ivy League university might be more appropriate. Maybe it'll happen. Who can really know?

I hadn't realized it before, but she is absolutely correct -- this Sgt Schultz "we know nothing, NOTHING" defense is the new Bush administration talking-point party line spin about Iraq.
And of course the great thing about the Sgt Schultz Defense is that you can apply it to just about everything, from Karl Rove ("who can know if a law was really broken?") to creationism ("who can know if evolution is actually the right theory?") to the Supreme Court ("who can know what cases they might be asked to decide in the future?") They may have finally found the all-purpose defense they need for all the Bush administration screw-ups.