Bush: "We Need More Milk in Our Diets"

Bob Woodward has an explosive new book out called "State of Denial." I don't plan on reading it, because why spend my time doing that when I can just read a summary/ analysis of the book in only 750 words, as I did in George Will's column today. The following is my summary/amnalysis of the material from the book as presented in his column.

First, a revealing anecdote from the book:

While leading the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in the summer of 2003, David Kay received a phone call from "Scooter" Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff, who wanted a particular place searched: "The vice president wants to know if you've looked at this area. We have indications -- and here are the geocoordinates -- that something's buried there." Kay and his experts located the area on the map. It was in the middle of Lebanon.

Ahhhhh, so sad. I say that now, but now watch Cheney go on TV tomorrow and say Saddam moved his weapons to Lebanon before the war started and that they are still there.

"State of Denial" will take a toll on government collegiality and the candor of its deliberations. It is based on astonishing indiscretions -- current and past officials making private memos and conversations public for motives that cannot be pure.

I'm pretty sure that colegiality and candor are already in the toilet. And for the record, I think that shedding light on incompetance (to put it nicely) and slavish devotion to terribly misguided ideas (to put it not so nicely) is a pure motive.

The book does not demonstrate that the president is in a state of denial. His almost exclusive and increasingly grating reliance on the rhetoric of unwavering resolve may be mistaken. It certainly has undermined his reputation as a realist. But he believes a president must be "the calcium in the backbone" of the nation, so the resolute face that he thinks he must show the nation does not preclude private anguish.

Bush was a realist? When was that? It's ironic that he feels that he is the calcium in the nation's backbone. Calcium's atomic number is 20, which is also Mr. Bush's IQ. Ha! Just kidding! Bush isn't stupid. He just lacks perspective. As in the perspective that he doesn't have enough perspective to effectively analyze and make good decisions in dealing with the chaos of the planet.

"Where's the leader?" Bush, according to Woodward, has exclaimed in dismay about the Iraqi government's dithering. "Where's George Washington? Where's Thomas Jefferson? Where's John Adams, for crying out loud?"

They are hiding from the sectarian death squads that are roaming the streets of Baghdad. Or perhaps, Operating this through the prism of an inappoproriate analogy of a completely different war from 230 years ago has prevented these leaders from emerging.