Seems that leadership is getting farther and farther from making fact-based decisions. With GWBush we saw the result of Dubya relying on his 'faith' and 'gut instinct' to make decisions, like exacting vengeance for an unproven plot by Saddam Hussein to kill his father.

Flashback 20 yrs:
""He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence."

nytimes.com - Faith certainty and the presidency of george w bush

Fast-forward to now, the right side of the aisle has left 'fact based decisions' in the dust and now embraces flat out lying, as evidenced by the election of Trump, his continued RNC support, and the GOP's refusal to bounce a blatant liar and cheat like George Santos out of the House. As long as Santos pushes the correct voting button, he is acceptable to the GQP.

Scary thing is, of the 142,000 who voted for the abysmal liar, a substantial number would vote for him again because he can be relied upon to push the right button....same as Trump's base voted for him in 2020 despite his continued stream of lies.