Novak Interview: What a Jerk!

There's an interesting little interview of Robert Novak in this weekend's NYT Magazine, touching on two topics: his outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame (which he still thinks was OK, because she "wasn't very important"), and his conversion from Judaism to Roman Catholicism, in which he notes that the Roman Catholics Church "is the only true religion." Here are some excerpts:

Excerpts from: ROBERT NOVAK INTERVIEW, by DEBORAH SOLOMON

Published in NYT magazine: July 15, 2007

It has been four years since you were catapulted into the headlines for outing the C.I.A. officer Valerie Plame in your syndicated column, yet the story lives on, most recently in the uproar over the commutation of Scooter Libby’s prison sentence. Would you like to see him pardoned? Yes. I don’t see how you can have obstruction of justice when there is no underlying crime.


But as you well know, he lied under oath to the grand jury investigating the leak of Plame’s name to the press. I think he got mixed up. It was not a lie. I think he got confused. That’s why you need lawyers — to make sure you don’t get confused. I was very careful in my testimony to the grand jury and before that to Mr. Fitzgerald to make sure that I didn’t fabricate anything.
If you could rewrite your newspaper column of July 14, 2003, would you leave out the part where you identify Plame as a C.I.A. operative and destroy her cover? I don’t know. I thought journalistically, it was justifiable. Nobody had told me — and I still don’t believe — that it put anybody’s life in danger. I don’t think she was an important person in the C.I.A.
By your own account, you converted from Judaism after meeting Msgr. Peter Vaghi, a former Republican lawyer and adviser to Senator Pete Domenici who made you feel comfortable with Catholic liturgy. That’s right. He was a source of mine before he was a priest. He knew me; he wasn’t just some strange priest that I didn’t know. It was one of the several serendipitous things that led me into the church.
That’s not a very spiritual reason for converting. What if you had met a Republican rabbi who had provided tips for your column? Would you have become a more observant Jew? >The point is very difficult for a non-Catholic to appreciate. But I believe that Catholicism is the only true religion. The Holy Spirit has convinced me of that.

I find this guy's thinking (as displayed in this interview) to be amazing, providing obvious examples (certainly not peculiar to him) of the capacity, or really the preference, of the human mind to engage in what we in psychology call "cognitive distortions": rationalization, self-justification, black-and-white thinking, idealization/devaluation, and probably several more than do not instantly spring to mind. He justifies his behavior (which has been condemned by liberals and conservatives alike) by minimizing its negative impact, and by devaluing the target of his misbehavior (an undercover CIA operative); he idealizes his new religion, devaluing all other religions, and at the same time engaging in simplistic (black-and-white) thinking (if one religion is "true" then all others are false).

Again, these mental maneuvers are certainly not peculiar to Robert Novak. My mind engages in them, too, and (if you are a normal human) so does yours. What I thank Robert Novak )and his interviewer, Deborah Solomon) for is these excellent examples, because they provide "object lessons." That is, they give me (and maybe you, too) fresh motivation to watch my own mind and, if possible, to do so compassionately (maybe even with a sense of humor), and not get tricked into believing that my mental maneuvers are producing anything that I wish to foolishly proclaim as The Truth...