by hilzoy
Once upon a time, we used to expect our Presidents to have some idea what they were talking about. Once upon a time, when a President said something completely ludicrous, people were shocked and worried. For instance, when Gerald Ford said that “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration”, no one just chuckled and thought: ha ha ha, isn’t that funny. They had the quaint, old-fashioned idea that our country’s leader ought to know better.
Under George W. Bush, of course, we have come to expect much less. He is, after all, the same President who told Vladimir Putin that Russia should model itself on Iraq, and who told us that “when I was going to college, I never dreamed that the United States of America could be attacked,” even though he went to college at the height of the Cold War, when large numbers of intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads were pointed straight at our cities. After enough statements like that, it’s easy to become blasé about these things. Easy, but wrong. We should never allow ourselves to get used to the idea that our President, the man who commands our armed forces and deploys our diplomats, has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about.
That’s why it’s worth dwelling on the speech he gave yesterday. It was an absolutely appalling mishmash of error, illogic, and slander. Admittedly, it’s a little hard to get your hands around: as Josh Marshall said, “To get a grasp on an argument, to support it or take it apart, requires that it have some grounding in reality or actual fact.” Bush’s speech had no such grounding: it was a sort of free-floating fantasy whose only discernible connection to the actual world was in its lethal effects. Still, it’s worth trying to understand. I do my best below the fold.