Who Is Afraid Of Facts?

Noah Millman compares the Euro crisis to the Iraq War and the housing bubble. He thinks each crisis was the result of insecure leaders:

Larison thinks that ideological thinking is what causes a refusal to accept threatening facts. I think that has the arrow of causation backwards: threatening facts are what prompt a turn to ideological thinking as a way of getting said facts out of the mental frame. And it is an insecure mind – insecure of its own judgment, or its own expertise, or its own authority, or what-have-you – for whom facts are threatening things.