So Outlandish and Inconceivable?

From the Washington Post story on the Daily Mirror story on W's "joke" about blowing up al-Jazeera:

"We are not interested in dignifying something so outlandish and inconceivable with a response," White House spokesman Scott McClellan told the Associated Press in an e-mail.

It's funny what becomes "outlandish and inconceivable" (one can't help thinking of Wallace Shawn's duplicitous, lisping Vizzini in The Princess Bride) to folks like Scott. For lots of Americans--and for lots of their representatives--it was "outlandish and inconceivable" that their president (or vice-president) would lie , even a little bit, in order to justify a prolonged, costly, ugly war, one that would result in the deaths of thousands of American soldiers, tens of thousands of Iraqis.

Most intelligent people have rejected as "outlandish" the administration's insinuations that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks. The administration itself--quite obviously and obliviously--failed to conceive of the inevitable looting of Baghdad museums just after the invasion. They also failed to conceive of the war's real financial costs, insisting--as though it were not even worth talking about--that Iraq's own oil revenue would pay for the reconstruction. They failed to conceive of the implacable tensions, exacerbated by neighboring countries, generated by clashing religious perspectives.

When one speaks, as McClellan does, of the "inconceivable," he points to the real problem: a failure of the imagination. This administration has shown us a stunning inability to imagine that which they don't already think they know. After all, what stifles the imagination like hubris? Sophocles makes us wince two thousand years later at a king's fundamental lack of imagination. We want to grab Oedipus by the shoulders: "Listen to Tiresias! Think." W, Dick, and all the gang--especially McClellan--have shown us over and over and over that they're incapable of transcending their fixed ideas of reality, incapable of the kind of imagination leadership really requires.

I do not find it inconceivable that W would suggest compromising one of the very freedoms he just lectured China about. The way he smirks all the time, how are we supposed to know--and why should we care, anyway--if he were joking?

Here's hoping the American public grows more imaginative every day.