NYT: Has He Started Talking to the Walls....(Rich nails it again)

[Aviation Pro]

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.

Cognitive dissonance does not describe Little Monkey's current behavior. The little simian is certifiable and needs to be in a padded prison cell. I imagine that in the dead of night, when the visions awaken him and he hears the moans of thousands of people, that he curls up in a fetal position and whimpers, "Mommy, make them go away."

Full article here: http://select.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/opinion/03rich.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print (subscription required).

[Straight Shooter]

1. bush hears nothing in the dead of night but his own megalomaniacal heartbeat.

Never ascribe any sense of guilt or remorse to him. He is cold as ice.

I imagine bush would never talk to the paintings on the White House walls. Rather, he would stand there intently listening, as he imagines them talking to him.

[gumby]

2. I've been calling my Senators with concerns about

Bush's 'mental health' for at least 4 years. I always tried to do it in the most reasonable way possible, but always winced and wondered if the person at the other end of the line thought *I* was the batty one.

Now, after all these years, it seems that everyone else is catching up. Better late than never.

[Gman]

3. He would talk to the pictures if

he knew their correct names. He should try to stop calling them "those old, dead dudes on the wall over there".

[rosesaylavee]

9. That's right!

:rofl:

[The Roux Comes First]

4. Doesn't it evoke a very dark Faulkner/Tennessee Williams

screenplay? - think of the blinkered women around him, as just one example. Mom is distressed at having the Real World and the plight of folks who can't just summon a servant to make the hard parts go away sully her bubble-icious Lawrence Welk waltz through life. Laura is the 666 anti-librarian if I ever saw one. With few exceptions, the other acknowledged librarians I have encountered in my life have been wondrously curious, inspiring folks with an attitude to match. This one seems to be two-thirds of the way to a fatal dose of arsenic or something.

[rosesaylavee]

10. But the wonderful

delicacy of characters is missing here that Williams always manage to convey. Maybe they are more fragile than they appear? All except Babs that is. She is a brute and will end up screaming and thrashing around at the end of this play.

[MissWaverly]

12. Laura resembles my high school librarian

her goal in life was to keep everyone out of the library to protect the books, the library
was a vacuum filled with the never read books. She would have abhorred the current on-line
community which allows the unwashed multitudes to Google anything they wish.

[Lisa]

15. She's probably have a coronary if she met the librarians I hang out with

They recently went to bat on behalf of a bunch of admittedly-lacklustre popular films ("Doogal", "The Cat in the Hat", etc.) which a number of patrons had wanted the DVD collection to acquire. Central Purchasing refused to order them, on the grounds that they had been panned by some critics ... even when people in the community offered to donate them, the head of Cataloguing said that this sort of thing "undermined the quality of the collection".

"My" librarians went ballistic, and protested that it's not the library's job to censor materials ... that if someone started making quality assessments they would have to exclude Jackie Collins or John Grisham on similar grounds, so where would the line be drawn? (One of them started wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed "There is something in my library to offend everyone".) They confided to me that it would probably be more glamourous to be defending something like "Fahrenheit 9/11" or "An Inconvenient Truth", but basically it's the same issue at stake, so they felt it was their duty to speak up.

[Porcupine]

5. Put Bush in a MRI and his head would look like swiss cheese

due to his alcoholic past. He never was very bright and 25 years of hard drinking kills a few billion neurons on average. His IQ is probably a B- on your normal test scale and dropping.


The Republicans do love to elevate the mentally ill to the Presidency. I wonder what that says about their party.

[indepat]

6. Even if W were in a state of denial and completely untethered from reality, he is their

near-dictator so what if a few countries, including our own once-Republic, has to be sacrificed, he's one of their own and that's all that matters to his core supporters. inde :patriot:

[POAS]

7. It doesn't even matter if he

even exists, they would revere the image like Orwell's "Big Brother" come to save them from the enemy.

[xchrom]

8. they should've known that from the get go

when he didn't know who the president of pakistan was.

he's not stupid -- he's sick -- as in torture living beings sick.

[Miss Chybil]

11. You're assuming he has enough of a conscience to have visions

and hear moaning people. He has said before, he sleeps very well at night.

[KAT119]

13. Frank Rich isby far the clearest voice for truth at the NYT.

[chill_wind]

14. When he sleeps at night (in his own special words....)

"Sometimes when I sleep at night I think of (Dr. Seuss's) 'Hop on Pop.'" —George W. Bush, in a speech about childhood education, Washington, D.C., April 2, 2002


"I want to thank you for taking time out of your day to come and witness my hanging." —George W. Bush, at the dedication of his portrait, Austin, Texas, Jan. 4, 2002

But all in all, it's been a fabulous year for Laura and me." —George W. Bush, summing up his first year in office, Washington, D.C., Dec. 20, 2001

http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/blbushisms2001.htm