A disturbing pattern of inaction

Some of us have realized from the beginning that George W. Bush regards the presidency as some kind of giant game of dress-up, where he gets to play king, bark out orders, surround himself with sycophants, and wear almost the entire array of Village People drag.

No one seems to have told him that his job is to lead -- and going to war because you want to show that you have a bigger dick than Daddy did doesn't count.

From ignoring the August 2001 PDB to ignoring warnings of the Iraqi insurgency, to ignoring warnings that the new Medicare Drug Plan was going to have a rocky rollout, to ignoring the very real probability of disaster in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Bush pattern of ignoring warnings is clear.

Krugman:

Knight Ridder's Washington bureau reports that from 2003 on, intelligence agencies "repeatedly warned the White House" that "the insurgency in Iraq had deep local roots, was likely to worsen and could lead to civil war." But senior administration officials insisted that the insurgents were a mix of dead-enders and foreign terrorists.

Intelligence analysts who refused to go along with that line were attacked for not being team players. According to U.S. News & World Report, President Bush's reaction to a pessimistic report from the C.I.A.'s Baghdad station chief was to remark, "What is he, some kind of defeatist?"

Many people have now seen the video of the briefing Mr. Bush received before Hurricane Katrina struck. Much has been made of the revelation that Mr. Bush was dishonest when he claimed, a few days later, that nobody anticipated the breach of the levees.

But what's really striking, given the gravity of the warnings, is the lack of urgency Mr. Bush and his administration displayed in responding to the storm. A horrified nation watched the scenes of misery at the Superdome and wondered why help hadn't arrived. But as Newsweek reports, for several days nobody was willing to tell Mr. Bush, who "equates disagreement with disloyalty," how badly things were going. "For most of those first few days," Newsweek says, "Bush was hearing what a good job the Feds were doing."

Now for one you may not have heard about. The new Medicare drug program got off to a disastrous start: "Low-income Medicare beneficiaries around the country were often overcharged, and some were turned away from pharmacies without getting their medications, in the first week of Medicare's new drug benefit," The New York Times reported.

How did this happen? The same way the other disasters happened: experts who warned of trouble ahead were told to shut up.

This all goes back to what Ron Suskind wrote in 2004; this notion of creating your own reality:

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

If your fabricated reality says that terrorism is little-boy stuff and your efforts are better spent saber-rattling at China, you ignore a briefing saying that Osama Bin Laden is going to hit us, and hit us hard. If your fabricated reality says that Saddam was involved in 9/11, and that you can fight a war against him with 130,000 troops, that you will be greeted with sweets and flowers and dancing in the streets, then you ignore warnings from your own military generals and intelligence agencies that there is a strong likelihood of a strong postwar insurgency. If your fabricated reality says that you're prepared to deal with the aftermath of a Gulf coast category 5 hurricane, you ignore the warnings of your own disaster preparedness people that this is the disaster scenario against which people have been warning for years.

The notion that an empire can create its own reality should have been Americans' first clue that they are being led by someone who's not quite playing with a full deck. That anyone gave credence to the idea that those of us who don't march in lockstep with the Bush Administration delusional world are simply in the "reality-based community" -- as if that were simply another opinion, like, say, the law of gravity, and that the "created reality" pulled out of the ass of George W., Bush is just as valid, is why we're in the fix we are now.

Reality is that George W. Bush is either insane, inept, evil, or all of the above. And all of the flight suits and other macho drag he affects, all the swagger, all the fearmongering, and all the fervent desire to believe that the president is up to the job won't change the facts.

Because like it or not, the reality-based community is where we all have to live.