Sophistry and the Bush Administration

On January 18 Paul Krugman published a column that contains the following quote:

All of this was right, except for one thing: U.S. financial markets, it turns out, were characterized less by sophistication than by sophistry, which my dictionary defines as “a deliberately invalid argument displaying ingenuity in reasoning in the hope of deceiving someone.”

Wikipedia elaborates that:

A sophism is a specious argument used for deceiving someone. It might be crafted to seem logical while actually being wrong, or it might use difficult words and complicated sentences to intimidate the audience into agreeing, or it might appeal to the audience's prejudices and emotions rather than logic, like raising doubts towards the one asserting, rather than his assertion.

Seems to me this pretty much describes the entire Bush Administration starting with the stolen election, including misleading the country into invading and occupying Iraq, the unforgivable mishandling of Katrina and now the coming recession.