Out of Touch with the Reality-Based Community

In this morning's New York Times, Frank Rich is concerned with the Prez's relationship with the real world. His title wonders if Bush has wandered into Richard Nixon territory with the question, "Has He Started Talking to the Walls?" He hasn't quite got evidence for that yet, but he makes a good case for his larger point.

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.

Rich provides a few examples from the last few days that you can read yourself. But after he makes those points, he returns to his larger argument.

In his classic study, "The Great War and Modern Memory," Paul Fussell wrote of how World War I shattered and remade literature, for only a new language of irony could convey the trauma and waste. Under the auspices of Mr. Bush, the Iraq war is having a comparable, if different, linguistic impact: the more he loses his hold on reality, the more language is severed from its meaning altogether.

When the president persists in talking about staying until "the mission is complete" even though there is no definable military mission, let alone one that can be completed, he is indulging in pure absurdity. The same goes for his talk of "victory," another concept robbed of any definition when the prime minister we are trying to prop up is allied with Mr. Sadr, a man who wants Americans dead and has many scalps to prove it. The newest hollowed-out Bush word to mask the endgame in Iraq is "phase," as if the increasing violence were as transitional as the growing pains of a surly teenager. "Phase" is meant to drown out all the unsettling debate about two words the president doesn't want to hear, "civil war."

When news organizations, politicians and bloggers had their own civil war about the proper usage of that designation last week, it was highly instructive - but about America, not Iraq. The intensity of the squabble showed the corrosive effect the president's subversion of language has had on our larger culture. Iraq arguably passed beyond civil war months ago into what might more accurately be termed ethnic cleansing or chaos. That we were fighting over "civil war" at this late date was a reminder that wittingly or not, we have all taken to following Mr. Bush's lead in retreating from English as we once knew it.

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I have not been one to buy into the arguments that Mr. Bush is stupid or is the sum of his "Bushisms" or is, as feverish Internet speculation periodically has it, secretly drinking again. I still don't. But I have believed he is a cynic - that he could always distinguish between truth and fiction even as he and Karl Rove sold us their fictions. That's why, when the president said that "absolutely, we're winning" in Iraq before the midterms, I just figured it was more of the same: another expedient lie to further his partisan political ends.

But that election has come and gone, and Mr. Bush is more isolated from the real world than ever. That's scary. Neither he nor his party has anything to gain politically by pretending that Iraq is not in crisis. Yet Mr. Bush clings to his delusions with a near-rage - watch him seethe in his press conference with Mr. Maliki - that can't be explained away by sheer stubbornness or misguided principles or a pat psychological theory. Whatever the reason, he is slipping into the same zone as Woodrow Wilson did when refusing to face the rejection of the League of Nations, as a sleepless L.B.J. did when micromanaging bombing missions in Vietnam, as Ronald Reagan did when checking out during Iran-Contra.

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Some two years ago, I wrote that Iraq was Vietnam on speed, a quagmire for the MTV generation. Those jump cuts are accelerating now. The illusion that America can control events on the ground is just that: an illusion. As the list of theoretical silver bullets for Iraq grows longer (and more theoretical) by the day - special envoy, embedded military advisers, partition, outreach to Iran and Syria, Holbrooke, international conference, NATO - urgent decisions have to be made by a chief executive who is in touch with reality (or such is the minimal job description). Otherwise the events in Iraq will make the Decider's decisions for him, as indeed they are doing already.

Thanks to truthout for today's column from Frank Rich.