Smackdown

It's more than a little disingenuous for the newspaper which printed Judith Miller's utter fabricated Administration-fed crap on the front page to start squawking about the Iraq war now, but I'll take it:

We've seen it before: an embattled president so swathed in his inner circle that he completely loses touch with the public and wanders around among small knots of people who agree with him. There was Lyndon Johnson in the 1960's, Richard Nixon in the 1970's, and George H. W. Bush in the 1990's. Now it's his son's turn.

It has been obvious for months that Americans don't believe the war is going just fine, and they needed to hear that President Bush gets that. They wanted to see that he had learned from his mistakes and adjusted his course, and that he had a measurable and realistic plan for making Iraq safe enough to withdraw United States troops. Americans didn't need to be convinced of Mr. Bush's commitment to his idealized version of the war. They needed to be reassured that he recognized the reality of the war.

Instead, Mr. Bush traveled 32 miles from the White House to the Naval Academy and spoke to yet another of the well-behaved, uniformed audiences that have screened him from the rest of America lately. If you do not happen to be a midshipman, you'd have to have been watching cable news at midmorning on a weekday to catch him.

The address was accompanied by a voluminous handout entitled "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq," which the White House grandly calls the newly declassified version of the plan that has been driving the war. If there was something secret about that plan, we can't figure out what it was. The document, and Mr. Bush's speech, were almost entirely a rehash of the same tired argument that everything's going just fine. Mr. Bush also offered the usual false choice between sticking to his policy and beating a hasty and cowardly retreat.

Americans have finally realized that this president lives in a bubble and that his speeches are delivered only before hand-selected audiences. It's reminiscent of the country's disenchantment with game shows in the aftermath of the Charles Van Doren scandal of the 1950's. People may be gullible, and they may want to believe in their leaders, but they now realize that this president's words are hollow; that he either is delusional enough to believe his own words, or else he's lying through his teeth. And they no longer want to hear it.

When Ron Suskind quoted a White House aide as saying, "That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality", that should have been the wake-up call for all Americans. Instead, the already-aware became even more appalled, and those who wanted, who NEEDED to believe, refused to believe that this Administration could possibly be delusional. Well, there's no getting away from it now.

The tipping point has been reached with this president, and there's no turning back. We can only hope that his messianic delusions and this idea he has, fed by the likes of James Dobson and others, that he is God's anointed architect of Armageddon, can be kept in check long enough for us to get out of his Administration alive.