No one seems to be writing opinion pieces quite the way I would, so I decided to do it myself.

The name? Taverns are places where one goes to discuss the interesting events and things in the world, so this is my tavern.

I will offer my views on politics, economics, and whatever else strikes my fancy.
I will occasionally publish the entire article from another journal for purposes of causing discussion.

 

Bush is Insane

William Saletan of Slate wrote an article that explains how Bushs’ mind actually works. Here are some excerpts.

1. “To Bush, credibility means that you keep saying today what you said yesterday, and that you do today what you promised yesterday.” “The only words and deeds that have to match are his. No correspondence to reality is required. Bush can say today what he said yesterday, and do today what he promised yesterday, even if nothing he believes about the rest of the world is true.”

2. “Bush does occasionally cite other people's statements to support his credibility. Saddam Hussein "was a threat to the region. He was a threat to the United States," Bush told Moran. "That's … the assessment that Congress made from the intelligence. That's the exact same assessment that the United Nations Security Council made with the intelligence." Actually, the Security Council didn't say Iraq was a threat to the United States.”

3. “The more fundamental problem with Bush's appeal to prewar assessments by Congress and the Security Council is that these assessments weren't reality. They were attempts—not even independent attempts, since the administration heavily lobbied both bodies—to approximate reality. When they turned out not to match reality, members of Congress (including Republicans) and the Security Council (including U.S. allies) repudiated them. Not Bush. He's impervious to evidence.

4. "The United Nations passed a Security Council resolution unanimously that said, 'Disarm or face serious consequences.' And [Saddam] refused to disarm." Never mind that the Security Council didn't see what Bush saw in terms of Iraqi disarmament and didn't mean what Bush meant in terms of serious consequences. Never mind that this difference in perception was so vast that Bush ducked a second Security Council vote on a use-of-force resolution.

5. As Tuesday night's questions turned to the 9/11 investigation, Bush retreated again to the incontrovertible truths in his head. "There was nobody in our government, at least, and I don't think [in] the prior government, that could envision flying airplanes into buildings on such a massive scale," Except that Richard Clarke had envisioned exactly that scenario for the 1996 Olympics. These were external phenomena and therefore irrelevant. What mattered was that Bush couldn't "envision" the scenario.


6. "I wanted Tenet in the Oval Office all the time. And we had briefings about terrorist threats." This was Bush's notion of dealing with terrorism: being briefed by the CIA director. The world that mattered was the Oval Office. Did the briefings lead to action outside the office? No, because there was no "threat that required action."

7. Bush's answer to Chen: "What was interesting in [the brief] was that there was a report that the FBI was conducting field investigations. And that was good news, that they were doing their job." Here is a president who reads that the FBI has found "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijacking" and concludes that all is well because the FBI is "investigating" such activity. Why does Bush make this mistake? Because he doesn't understand that the "suspicious activity" is the subject of the brief. He thinks the "investigations" are the subject. He thinks he's being told about his version of reality—the world inside his administration—not the world of plots beyond his awareness.

8. After 9/11, the world changed for me," he explained Tuesday night. That's Bush in a nutshell: The world changed for him. Out went the assumption of safety, and in came the assumption of peril. In the real world, Bin Laden was still a religious fanatic with global reach, and Saddam was still a secular tyrant boxed in by sanctions and no-fly zones. But in Bush's head, everything changed.

9. Bush doesn't measure his version of the world against anybody else's. He measures his version against itself. He says the same thing today that he said yesterday. That's why, when he was asked Tuesday whether he felt any responsibility for failing to stop the 9/11 plot, he kept shrugging that "the country"—not the president—wasn't on the lookout.

Bush is a man who believes what he believes, and if outside evidence (what most of us call reality) conflicts with his beliefs, then he acts on his beliefs, not on any outside evidence.

Bush is clearly acting on the basis of the dream world within his head rather than reacting to the evidence of outside reality. Although some conservatives have called it “Leadership”, most of us call this behavior “Insanity”.

posted by Richard at 3:53 PM