Multiverse

The President's press conferences lately have taken on an increasingly schizophrenic quality as reality diverges further from his narrative. For the most part, the press has scrupulously ignored this, but Dan Froomkin (Bush's Imaginary Foe) of the Washington Post saves some of his paper's tattered honor with this analysis:
President Bush's angry nonanswers to two straightforward questions yesterday were among the best illustrations yet of his intense aversion to responding to his critics' actual arguments.

Rather than acknowledge and attempt to rebut the many concerns about his policies, Bush makes up inane arguments and then ridicules them.

Froomkin exhibits some examples:
Q Thank you, sir. Even after hearing that one of the major conclusions of the National Intelligence Estimate in April was that the Iraq war has fueled terror growth around the world, why have you continued to say that the Iraq war has made this country safer?"

"PRESIDENT BUSH: I, of course, read the key judgments on the NIE. I agree with their conclusion that because of our successes against the leadership of al Qaeda, the enemy is becoming more diffuse and independent. I'm not surprised the enemy is exploiting the situation in Iraq and using it as a propaganda tool to try to recruit more people to their -- to their murderous ways.

"Some people have guessed what's in the report and have concluded that going into Iraq was a mistake. I strongly disagree. I think it's naive. I think it's a mistake for people to believe that going on the offense against people that want to do harm to the American people makes us less safe."

OK, that's straw-man number one. Nobody I've heard of is suggesting that going on the offense against terrorists is bad. The question at hand is whether going on the offense against Iraq -- which had nothing to do with 9/11 -- made us less safe. By using this absurd straw-man, Bush leaves that issue unaddressed.

Froomkin has more, much more, in the same vein. The overall impression is to reinforce the idea that Bush is living in a parallel universe, interacting only weakly with ours. This may have started as calculated political dishonesty or spin, but as the discrepancy between his story and the real world increases, more and more he seems to be disconnected from reality.

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