Andrew Sullivan: Analrapist

(That's an 'Arrested Development' reference for you poor fools who never saw the show.)

Blogger Andrew Sullivan and his readers have been having a back-and-forth trying to analyze President Bush, in particular the bubble in which he lives and his failures as a leader in general. It's been interesting reading. Sullivan started it off-

There is also the unnerving possibility of psychological denial. I was struck, for example, by the fact that the president recently cited Abu Ghraib as one event that he regrets and that has deeply damaged the war on terror. So I scratch my head and ask myself: has it occurred to him that even the various official reports he commissioned trace that incident to decisions the president himself made to relax detainee standards in the war? Is he even aware that these incidents, again according to his own government's reports, have been replicated in every theater of combat? And yet, when given the chance to draw a line under all this, and embrace and enforce the McCain Amendment, the president still refused, and issued a signing statement reserving the right to break the law.

My only rational conclusion is that the president cannot face the consequences of his own actions and so simply blocks them out. Confronting Cheney and Rumsfeld on this is beyond his capacity. His psyche, rescued from alcoholism by rigid fundamentalism, has been sealed off from rational assessment of empirical reality, from basic concepts of responsibility and accountability. The people he has surrounded himself with have only one thing in common: the knowledge that the maintenance of his denial keeps them in their jobs. And so we have this bizarre unending war of attrition, where no strategic logic can be discerned, where goals are set with no means to attain them, and where American soldiers and Iraqi civilians are put through a grinder of brutality and terror. I'm saying this as someone who desperately wants us to succeed, but simply cannot understand why the president refuses to commit the necessary resources to do so.

In a later entry, a reader added this excellent reply-

"I think what you have is a man of fundamentally weak character. I mean, we're talking about someone who is essentially afraid of the Washington press corps. Ponder that for a moment and imagine how Al Quaeda must make him feel."

True. And sad.

Here's another story for a trained psychiatrist to analyze...

Bloggers dug up a section from a 2003 interview with President Bush in which he describes the laughs he and Laura shared on the night of September 11th. He says that, after a false security scare, he and Laura were thinking about how funny they must've looked hustling around the White House in their sleepwear. Bush noted that "the day ended on a relatively humorous note" for him. It is nice to know that, while I was awake all night replaying in my mind the sight of people jumping 95 floors to their death, the President was chuckling with the wife before falling asleep. Between the My Pet Goat incident in the morning and this at night, I don't believe it is cynical to state the President failed to comprehend the seriousness of the day's events.