Where on Earth does President Bush find the vast reservoir of hubris it must take to be such a condescending prick about All Things Iraq?
Not to overly psychoanalyze the guy, but he seems to have this mental image of himself as the father of democracy in the Middle East (if he has uttered a sentence in the last couple years that doesn’t incorporate the phrase "purple fingers," I haven’t heard it). You’d think he wasn’t the chief architect of a foreign policy that has plunged Iraq into a civil war, resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and made the entire world a more dangerous place to live.
But even though he’s been channeling his inner Baghdad Bob for a long time now, displaying an almost pathological inability to acknowledge any shred of reality in Iraq, I am still struck by the sheer scope of his delusion.
Case-in-point, this week’s joint press conference with President Bush and Prime Minister Kamal Nuri al-Maliki of Iraq. Via Froomkin’s column (a daily must-read), we learn that
[M]any Arab analysts saw Mr. Bush as managing Mr. Maliki. At one point he encouraged Mr. Maliki to call on members of the Iraqi news media and told him "good job!" as the news conference drew to a close.
"Good Job!"
What an A-hole.
He really seems to think that he is helping to usher in a new era of democracy in the Middle East. Remember this one from May 2004?
President Bush sought to rally Republican lawmakers around his Iraq plan Thursday, saying Iraqis are ready to "take the training wheels off" by assuming some political power.
Two years later, things are so much worse, but the rhetoric is as delusional and condescending as ever. This Administration is running on pure gall.