Bush's Divorce from Reality

Impeachment or Resignation: Pick Your Poison

By Ralph Nader

03/25/06 "Counterpunch" -- -- Attention please, good people! Adjust your routines and come to the aid of your country, and your children with your thoughtful patriotism. Don't just hope for impeachment, demand the resignation now of the mad hatters in the White House--George W. Bush and Richard Cheney.

Already, a large majority of you do not consider this shifty duo trustworthy. By more than two to one you disapprove of Bush's war in Iraq. Similar majorities believe this is also a President whose administrative incompetence--note the post-Katrina debacles compared to his promises last September in that devastated New Orleans--nearly matches his penchant for daily fabrications.

The precipitous drop in Bush's polls (Cheney's are even lower) is not coming from liberals who long ago registered negative in these national surveys. The drop is coming from millions of erstwhile Bush supporters, Bush voters, Bush-loving conservatives.

Why? Just look at or read the news every day. There goes Bush and Cheney insisting that conditions in Iraq are getting better and better, when they are getting worse and worse. And Americans also know this because hundreds of thousands of soldiers and other personnel are rotating from Iraq back into every state and community and telling millions of people the truth.

Repeated reports from diverse official, media and eyewitness accounts say that there is less electricity, more disease, less drinkable water, less housing, far less street security, less health care, less gasoline, fewer jobs and far more violence against civilians after the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld invasion in March 2003 than before the sanctioned, tottering, besieged dictator, Saddam Hussein, was toppled.

With Bush's own ambassador to Iraq warning of a possible civil war and Bush's handpicked interim Iraqi prime minister, Ayad Allawi saying "We are in a terrible civil conflict now," the serial delusionists, Bush and Cheney, having lied five ways into their war, go around daily as smarmy pollyannas spouting what Bush calls "a strategy that will lead to victory in Iraq".

Why, didn't you know about all the progress in Iraq? If only the media would report it, they both say again and again. Really! What about all the corruption by the many contractors, all the brutal militias that now often do their work wearing Iraqi soldier or police uniforms, all the bogus reconstruction, paid with billions of American taxpayer money? What about the spreading chaos that Bush has no intention of confronting, as international law requires invading occupiers to remedy. Remember Colin Powell's tight phrase, "We broke it, we own it," that sums up the global law on this subject.

Massive separation from reality frequently involves ordinary personalities with psychotherapy. Read the words of the The Washington Post's respected columnist, Eugene Robinson:

The people running this country sound convinced that reality is whatever they say it is. And if they've actually strayed into the realm of genuine self-delusion--if they actually believe the fantasies they're spinning about the bloody mess they made in Iraq over the past three years--then things are even worse than I thought.

He described Bush as "divorced from reality".

Worse still is the delusion that claims the Bush-Cheney War is not generating more terrorists. Mr. Bush doesn't listen to intelligence, military and diplomatic officials, or even to his CIA Director Porter Goss. Mr. Goss has testified that the U.S. occupation is a magnet and a training ground for even more terrorists from outside and inside Iraq. Thereby, setting up a boomerang against our national security in the future.

One area, however, in Iraq is proceeding on schedule--the building of four massive, permanent super-bases, complete with American suburban amenities such as Pizza Hut, Burger King, miniature golf courses, theaters, swimming pools and even a football field. There is almost a news blackout about Balad Air Base, al-Asad Airbase and others, thought not quite the blockage that the two White House draft-dodgers have placed on reporters trying to cover the return of the fallen soldiers to Dover, Delaware.

Senator Joe Biden (D-Delaware) spoke about the growing opposition by both Republican and Democratic Senators, to what can deliberately be called disinformation coming out of the Bush administration. Not to mention the refusal to respond at all to serious inquiries by members of Congress.

Unlike the Presidential ordering of military invasions that violate our domestic laws, our Constitution and international treaties to which the U.S. is a signatory, massive delusion in the White House is not an impeachable offense. But it should be a cause for resignation driven by popular bipartisan demand. Bush and Cheney have arrayed their no-fault power, their political egos against the interests of our country. They are obsessively-compulsed.

Bush recently traveled to West Virginia and did not speak to the poverty among some of the hardest workers in America. He went to Ohio on Air Force One and ignored the huge loss of manufacturing jobs there to Mexico, China and other authoritarian nations. No, instead, he brings his gigantic sign, "Plan for Victory", stands in front of it and, as befits the Mayor of Baghdad, talks about his delusions in that oil-rich, devastated country.

Reality, good citizens, can fairly describe the dictatorial Bush and Cheney as psychiatrically challenged. Send them to the unemployment lines, where Halliburton and Exxon will certainly pick them up.