Things I noticed over a long weekend …
posted 2-4-2008 8:14 p.m.
amended 2-7-2008 5:55 p.m.

 
… while down with a cold and ignoring the Super Bowl:

• George W. Bush is still stubbornly hallucinating about what’s going on in the world.

The country is finally restless with the current regime (at last! How long did they have to wait?), that's clear enough. How many ways can you take a 71 percent disapproval rating other than to admit that 71 percent of the populace hates you? Thus the sullen monotone delivery of the State of the Union address. And yet, beneath that depressed and depressing delivery was still the old, blindly stubborn pugnaciousness that is the flip side of the thin, shallow nice-guy routine that got W. Bush close enough to a win the second time around to steal it (the first time, he had to rely on The Supremes to steal it for him and on Gore's sense of honor not to pursue the matter further; what a waste *that* was).

Read the text of last Monday's State of the Union address, or even listen carefully to the words, and you hear that determined, knee-jerk rewriting of history in light of his own fantasy that is Shrub's trademark. He thinks if he tells a lie often enough, most people will believe it. More to the point, if he lies to himself often enough that he believes it, he expects us to believe it, too. Some will, sure — but the evidence of his incompetence is simply too great, the economy too badgered and the needless deaths too many to allow that now.