In press conferences, television ads, and interviews this year, President Bush has manifested a series of psychopathologies: an abstract notion of reality; confidence unhinged from facts and circumstances; and a conception of credibility that requires no correspondence to the external world. Tonight, as he vowed to stay the course in Iraq, Bush demonstrated another mental defect: incomprehension of his role in history as a fallible human agent. Absent such comprehension, Bush can't fix his mistakes in Iraq, because he can't see how—or even that—he screwed up.
It's regrettable that this president is never going to admit any shortcomings, much less failure. That's an aspect of Mr. Bush's character that we have to live with. But we cannot live without a serious plan for doing more than just getting through the June 30 transition and then muddling along until the November elections in the United States. The president still has a number of speeches left to deliver before June 30. We hope he will use them to come up with a more specific plan, to stop listing the things we already knew needed to be done and to explain to us how he intends to do them. An acknowledgment of past mistakes would be nice.
