Business as Usual

The NYT has a good story today on how the Bush administration appears incapable of dealing with its ongoing popularity crisis-- a side effect, no doubt, of not believing in reality:

Inside the White House, the staff is exhausted and the mood is defiant. Republicans are clamoring for a new chief of staff, the West Wing just cut its losses on a deal that would have given a Dubai company control of some terminal operations at six American ports, and President Bush's approval rating is at a record low.

But senior staff members insist that Mr. Bush is in good spirits, that calls from his party to inject new blood into the White House make him ever more stubborn to keep the old, and that he has become so inured to outside criticism that he increasingly tunes it out. ...

Staff members, many of whom have been with Mr. Bush since he first began running for president in 1999, responded on Friday in a familiar way: To mark the three-year anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, they announced that Mr. Bush would give a new round of speeches, starting Monday at George Washington University.

As ever, there will be no change in policy. Mr. Bush will talk, they said, about new progress in defeating "improvised explosive devices" and argue that the televised pictures of rising casualties and sectarian fighting obscure progress under way.

Another speech! Reiterate and repackage the same old tired aphorisms! We've turned the corner! This paragraph leaps out:

"They have a transmitter but not a listening device," said one well-known Republican with close ties to the administration who gets calls from White House staff members. "They'll say, 'What are you hearing, what's going on?' You tell them things aren't good on the Hill, you've got problems here, you've got problems there, or 'I was in Detroit and boy did I get an earful.' And their answer is, 'Everybody's just reading the headlines, we've got to get our message out better.' There's denial going on, and it starts at the top."

It's more than just denial; it's a pathological inability to respond to criticism, and hard evidence that this administration cares little about the actual effects of its policies. To say "everybody's just reading the headlines" as the nation literally falls apart is madness. We're doing more than reading the headlines; we're reading our bank statements and the weather report and the billboard down at the gas station. And no amount of spin will change what is spelled out clearly in those places.