Frank Rich:Has He Started Talking to the Walls?

IT turns out we’ve been reading the wrong Bob Woodward book to understand what’s going on with President Bush. The text we should be consulting instead is “The Final Days,” the Woodward-Bernstein account of Richard Nixon talking to the portraits on the White House walls while Watergate demolished his presidency. 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.

The most startling example was his insistence that Al Qaeda is primarily responsible for the country’s spiraling violence. Only a week before Mr. Bush said this, the American military spokesman on the scene, Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, called Al Qaeda “extremely disorganized” in Iraq, adding that “I would question at this point how effective they are at all at the state level.” 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.

But that’s not the half of it. Mr. Bush relentlessly refers to Iraq’s “unity government” though it is not unified and can only nominally govern. (In Henry Kissinger’s accurate recent formulation, Iraq is not even a nation “in the historic sense.”) After that pseudo-government’s prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, brushed him off in Amman, the president nonetheless declared him “the right guy for Iraq” the morning after. This came only a day after The Times’s revelation of a secret memo by Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, judging Mr. Maliki either “ignorant of what is going on” in his own country or disingenuous or insufficiently capable of running a government. Not that it matters what Mr. Hadley writes when his boss is impervious to facts.

In truth the president is so out of it he wasn’t even meeting with the right guy. No one doubts that the most powerful political leader in Iraq is the anti-American, pro-Hezbollah cleric Moktada al-Sadr, without whom Mr. Maliki would be on the scrap heap next to his short-lived predecessors, Ayad Allawi and Ibrahim al-Jaafari. Mr. Sadr’s militia is far more powerful than the official Iraqi army that we’ve been helping to “stand up” at hideous cost all these years. If we’re not going to take him out, as John McCain proposed this month, we might as well deal with him directly rather than with Mr. Maliki, his puppet. But our president shows few signs of recognizing Mr. Sadr’s existence.

http://select.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/opinion/03rich.html?hp

entire editorial
http://freedemocracy.blogspot.com/2006/12/frank-rich-has-he-started-talking-to.html

Nixon was always a bit nutty - a little nuttier toward the end.

Bush was always an evil asshole, but I get the impression that he's now gone full-blown batshit crazy. At this point, I'm pretty sure that he WANTS to get impeached and put out of his misery.

At least Nixon was able to say to himself that he didn't start Vietnam. Bush doesn't have that luxury, and it's got to be gnawing at what's left of his mind.

They knew they were hiring an incompetent illiterate lunatic. They liked that about him. They counted on it.

He was used while he was profitable, and, just like all of our other world leaders, he's being discarded: Bin Laden, Hussein, and all the rest.

The US is used to placing puppets in the right places to make a buck, and then scapegoating them later when the money dries up.

This is no different.

Bush is scarier than Nixon ever was, for many reasons. For one, Nixon far outranked Bush in knowledge of foreign policy, innate intelligence, you name it. For another, Bush has surrounded himself with men and women dedicated to the overthrow of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, while packing federal civil service agencies with incompetent and/or malignant political cronies.

And Bush is apparently batshit crazy.

Gods, I hated Richard Nixon. I never could have imagined a president so dire as to make Nixon look good on any level at all. George W. Bush has done that.

Hekate