Losing touch with reality

Happy Monday, Snackers! I hope you all had a gluttonous and tryptophan-tinted long weekend. And now it's back to the grindstone, with the added stress of completing your holiday shopping without being trampled to death by crazed bargain hunters. (Seriously. I live in the home state of the Mall of America. I know from crazed bargain hunters.)

Fortunately, there's all kinds of amusing stuff to keep you preoccupied and take your mind off the looming holidays. For example, in a news item that should surprise exactly no one who's been paying attention, it seems that the president is losing his ever-tenuous grip on reality. Sy Hersh spoke with Wolf Blitzer yesterday and gave the details (via Atrios):

BLITZER: Here's what you write. You write, "Current and former military and intelligence officials have told me that the president remains convinced that it is his personal mission to bring democracy to Iraq, and that he is impervious to political pressure, even from fellow Republicans. They also say that he disparages any information that conflicts with his view of how the war is proceeding."

Those are incredibly strong words, that the president basically doesn't want to hear alternative analysis of what is going on.

HERSH: You know, Wolf, there is [sic] people I've been talking to -- I've been a critic of the war very early in the New Yorker, and there were people talking to me in the last few months that have talked to me for four years that are suddenly saying something much more alarming.

They're beginning to talk about some of the things the president said to him about his feelings about manifest destiny, about a higher calling that he was talking about three, four years ago.

I don't want to sound like I'm off the wall here. But the issue is, is this president going to be capable of responding to reality? Is he going to be able -- is he going to be capable if he going to get a bad assessment, is he going to accept it as a bad assessment or is he simply going to see it as something else that is just a little bit in the way as he marches on in his crusade that may not be judged for 10 or 20 years. [...]

And so we have an election coming up -- Yes. I've had people talk to me about maybe Congress is going to have to cut off the budget for this war if it gets to that point. I don't think they're ready to do it now.

But I'm talking about sort of a crisis of management. That you have a management that's seen by some of the people closely involved as not being able to function in terms of getting information it doesn't want to receive. [more]

The interesting thing about this is not that the Preznit is a loony-bird - that's old news. The interesting thing is that it seems like members of his administration are beginning to realize that he's a loony-bird. And that maybe their plan of putting a dumbass in office isn't going to work out exactly as they thought it would. Chickens, meet roost. It's time to come on home.