Peas in a Pod

I'm certainly not the first to notice a similarity between George Bush and Sarah Palin, but I was particularly struck by a pair of descriptions I saw today. First, we had a baffling statement about Bush on Saturday morning in the New York Times:

[A]s he spends his last months in office trying to avert a global economic collapse, Mr. Bush has been telling people privately that it's a good thing he's in charge.

"He said that if it was going to happen at all, he was glad it was happening under his presidency, because he had a good group of people in D.C. working for him," Dru Van Steenberg, one of several small-business owners who met with Mr. Bush in San Antonio earlier this week. The president expressed the same sentiment, others said, during a similar private session in Chantilly, Va., the next day.

"He said that whoever was going to take over in January was going to have a huge crisis on their hands the day they come into office," Ms. Van Steenberg added. "He thought by this happening now, that perhaps everyone could see signs of improvement before the next president comes into office."

A bit later in the day, that description of Bush to the rescue came back to me when I heard about Sarah Palin commenting on the Troopergate report from Alaska that was issued late Friday. That report said that, although she didn't break the law as governor in firing her state police commissioner, she did abuse her power and act unethically in pursuing her vendetta against her former brother-in-law. When she was asked today if she had abused her power, she replied:

If you read the report, you'll see that there's nothing unlawful or unethical about replacing a cabinet member. You've got to read the report, sir.

She's falling back on the report that accuses her of abuse of power to clear her name of abuse of power! Like the current president, she seems to erect her own reality and then live quite contentedly in it. We need to make sure that the next administration doesn't blow off the reality-based community in favor of its own way of doing things. Because reality sure isn't going to blow the nation off.