President Bush has been doing a lot of interviews and press conferences lately, trying to put a positive light on the many scary and downright crazy things happening in the world these days; and to assure us all that he knows just what he's doing and it's all under control, everything's a-okay. In the process, he has displayed two notable attributes. One is that he manages to stay eternally upbeat and optimistic, no matter what madness is going on in the world around him. The other is that he seems to be totally out of touch with reality, and with the basic facts, when it comes to crucial issues involving our national security; a subject on which he obviously likes to preach and pontificate frequently.
I.e., when Larry King asked Bush about the current North Korean missile crisis, Bush asserted that if missiles were to head our way for real at some point, then we would be able to shoot them down. This claim is dubious at best. The last time we tested our missile defense system, it failed. And that was in a controlled environment. To state to the American people that our back-up plan in case North Korea fires multiple nukes at us is to shoot them down with a questionable defense system seems grossly irresponsible, to say the least.
When Larry King asked Bush about Osama bin Laden, he stated rather cavalierly, almost with a chuckle, "Oh, we'll get him eventually, it's only a matter of time". Five years have passed since 9/11. How much more time will it take? And how many more terrorist attacks and other mayhem will occur around the world in the meantime, because we invaded Iraq and pissed of the entire Middle East, instead of focusing on disbanding Al Qaeda and improving our Middle East alliances?
The bizarre reality is that just recently it was announced that the CIA had instead disbanded its unit that was devoted to hunting down bin Laden. When a reporter brought this up at his Chicago press conference, Bush flatly denied that this was even true; despite the fact that this has been reported by pretty much every news source everywhere for the past week or so. This guy isn't informed enough to be a competent blogger, not to mention the president.
Also in his press conference, Bush once again claimed that one of the reasons we had to attack Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power was because he wouldn't allow inspectors in to see if he had WMD. This is flat-out false, and a deftly rewritten piece of Bush administration history. It's precisely the other way around. We had to tell the weapons inspectors on the ground in Iraq in March of 2003 to hightail-it the heck out of there, because we were going to start bombing. An easily verifiable falsehood is one of our main justifications for going to war? The other obvious shame here is that the mainstream media lets him get away with this statement every time he makes it, which is often.
And when asked about low public support for the war in Iraq, Bush said that part of the problem is that the positive developments are being overshadowed by the ongoing violence. He cited "when the electricity is turned on" as one of the overlooked positive developments. His point might have been a good one, if when we attacked Iraq they had no electricity there, period. What Bush apparently doesn't know (and someone should inform him, so he'll know what he's talking about at his next news conference) is that in Baghdad they get about 4 hours of electricity per day right now, which is less electricity than they got under Saddam Hussein. And it's the same when it comes to most of the basic necessities in Iraq, such as accessibility to water, employment, and of course security: the Iraqis are living under worse conditions then they were under Saddam Hussein. Imagine that, we've made the country a worse place to be than it was when ruled by a fanatical dictator. And yet, the reason the American people are losing support for this war is that we're just not seeing all the good that's coming out of it, what with those car bombs and roaming assassins and torture chambers overshadowing the fact that sometimes, at certain hours, the Iraqi people actually have electricity and clean water, or at least water that's clean once they boil it.
I wonder if perhaps there's any connection between Bush's eternally sunny, hunky-dory mood, and his rather selective and tenuous relationship with that thing we call "reality"?
