A story has circulated, and the White House hasn't denied it, that last week in Australia the president said "We're kicking ass" in Iraq. It would have been helpful had he specified who's ass it is we're kicking, if indeed there are asses being kicked independent of our self-kicked asses.
But what the hell. It was just George talking, and for some inexplicable reason this president isn't required -- not by his keepers, not by Congress, not by the Fourth Estate -- to tether his musings to reality. He's permitted to just go his own way, in his own little world, uttering imponderables with impunity.
In Hawaii yesterday, on the way home from his excellent Anbar adventure, the president promptly gave a repeat performance of his existential disconnect, saying he "came back from Iraq encouraged by what I saw."
What he saw, of course, was nothing more than the friendly faces of 10,000 American troops and the inside walls of a heavily armed American fortress. In similar circumstances I, too, would have been encouraged, I suppose -- encouraged that I just might get my ass out of Iraq alive and in one piece, unlike the non-fortress-dwelling American troops patrolling the internecine streets of Baghdad and other Iraqi vacation spots.
But what the hell. It was just George talking, and no one really expects the president of the United States to make sense, appear coherent, or accurately gauge reality. It's come down to that. Things are that bad.
To his encouragement he added, "I believe we're doing the right thing there for the security of the country and for the peace of the world."
Here was a splendid example of how ruthlessly the repeated deployment of Orwellian doublespeak et al can strangle the mind and make the real a stranger.
I have no doubt that after all these years of vulgar distortions, George actually does believe that the "security of the country" depends on its continued insecurity and the "peace of the world" depends on a global conflagration. It's called mental resolution -- the human ability to justify the most ignoble, the absolutely dumbest, of one's actions, by convincing oneself that the original actions were, in fact, noble and smart.
Add (more than) a pinch of a messianic complex, mix in some Orwellian speechwriting to reinforce the delusion -- and presto, you've a marvelous recipe for national ruination.
Still, the nation must be willing to participate in its own suicide. And that's where Congress and the Fourth Estate come in.
It is the sheerest of follies, of course, to expect any of this democratic "We the people" crappola to play a decisive role. Instead, We the sheep will follow the automated news from sophisticated journalists that Congress, the poor dear, is helplessly and hopelessly divided: that war-funding filibusters are simply not possible; that antiwar Democrats have done all they can do; that, in short, although the nation has collectively raised the gun to its own head, it's powerless to lower it.
The Assman the Madman is in charge, you see, because no one else is. Our steadfast national decline is more than a failure of imagination; it's the triumph of Orwellian delusion by default.
Hence the unreal -- the free-falling surreal -- has become our real ass-kicking reality.