As Mr. Bush has ricocheted from Vietnam to Latvia to Jordan in recent weeks, we’ve witnessed the troubling behavior of a president who isn’t merely in a state of denial but is completely untethered from reality. It’s not that he can’t handle the truth about Iraq. He doesn’t know what the truth is.
What Frank Rich writes about in today's Times has been a subtext of much research and commentary about the Bush presidency -- not just obstinancy and arrogance but a streak of madness. And in Bush's case -- given his education -- of willful ignorance. This in turn is reinforced by his sour, self-aggrandizing religious affiliation and by the bitterness of a man who must know he has been a lifelong failure.
He clings to obsessions. Al Qaeda is public enemy #1.
Military intelligence estimates that Al Qaeda makes up only 2 percent to 3 percent of the enemy forces in Iraq, according to Jim Miklaszewski of NBC News. The bottom line: America has a commander in chief who can’t even identify some 97 percent to 98 percent of the combatants in a war that has gone on longer than our involvement in World War II.
His perversion of language serves to reinforce the obsessions.
...The more he loses his hold on reality, the more language is severed from its meaning altogether. When the president persists in talking about staying until “the mission is complete” even though there is no definable military mission, let alone one that can be completed, he is indulging in pure absurdity. The same goes for his talk of “victory,” another concept robbed of any definition when the prime minister we are trying to prop up is allied with Mr. Sadr, a man who wants Americans dead and has many scalps to prove it. The newest hollowed-out Bush word to mask the endgame in Iraq is “phase,” as if the increasing violence were as transitional as the growing pains of a surly teenager. “Phase” is meant to drown out all the unsettling debate about two words the president doesn’t want to hear, “civil war.”
There have been more and more references lately in commentaries about "sending a delegation into the Oval Office" to stop Bush or even finding a way to "remove him." At least we can comfort ourselves with the realization that though it may have taken six years, America is waking up to the truth about Bush.
Rich's column today seems to be driven by his -- and our -- moral revulsion. Since Bush has made his religion a tool of his politics, it's more than fair to counter that his politics and his life have demonstrated no embrace of the basic tenets of the judeo-christian morality he finds so useful as a marketing device. A good many Americans knew that about him when he first took office. The rest are having to deal with the discovery that he is a fake and -- given the powers of his office and the mess he's dragged us all into -- a very dangerous one.
