"I Am the President!!"

The man is SO out of touch with reality, it's scary. Perhaps it's time for a 12-step program:

The White House sees terrorists as born, not created by history, bearing the mark of Cain, not the mark of circumstance. There is a scarlet "T" written on their foreheads at birth and the only answer is to destroy them. This kind of thinking, of course, relieves the thinker of any responsibility for the presence of the insurgent-terrorist-whatever in our innocent midst.

What's more, there is not much real give in the administration's policies. True, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other American diplomats met Memorial Day weekend with the Iranians in Baghdad (a good first move but limited, since the Iranians have most of the power because of our incredible stupidity in Iraq). But by all reports, President Bush is more convinced than ever of his righteousness.

Friends of his from Texas were shocked recently to find him nearly wild-eyed, thumping himself on the chest three times while he repeated "I am the president!" He also made it clear he was setting Iraq up so his successor could not get out of "our country's destiny."

[emphasis added]

I know 5-year-olds who can't throw a better temper-tantrum. Some of them are smarter, too.

[cross-posted at Watching Those We Chose]

Iraq Report Card

Lost in the coverage of the 4th anniversary of Dubya's grand war is the fact that the Iraqi government missed the Bushco's stated benchmarks indicating progress in Iraq. The Bushies had called for the major objectives to be met by this month.

Four of the significant objectives are final approval of an oil law regulating distribution of oil revenues and foreign investment in the oil industry; reversal of the de-Baathification laws that are widely blamed for alienating Sunnis by driving them out of government ministries; the holding of local elections; and reform of Iraq’s Constitution.

A Pentagon assessment of progress in Iraq through the end of last year, submitted to Congress on Wednesday, notes that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki “has promised to reform his government, beginning with his cabinet and the ministries,” but that none of those steps had yet happened. It cited the “passage of a framework” last month for sharing oil revenues among Iraq’s ethnic groups as a modest sign of progress, but notes that the last two months of 2006, before Mr. Bush announced his new strategy, “saw little progress on the reconciliation front.”

The report also described some of what is happening in Iraq as a “civil war” and described this past October through December as the most violent three-month period since 2003.

And that means those "surge" troops will likely need to remain on the ground in Baghdad and its suburbs for a longer period of time.

Here's another key graf:

Administration officials have never rescinded the “notional timeline,” though the Iraqi government had already missed most of the deadlines by the time Ms. Rice gave it to Congress in January. That document listed political achievements that Washington expected would be fulfilled between September 2006 and March 2007; with the exception of the oil law, which awaits final passage, most have not been achieved. American and Iraqi officials had agreed on the notional timeline back in October.

And here's my favorite:

Philip D. Zelikow, until December the counselor at the State Department, said part of the delay stemmed from “a recognition that things were worse than people realized.”

“Significant parts of the new strategy need to be developed from scratch,” he said.

In other words (as Bush is so found of saying), Bush's plan for victory was based on fiction, and there currently is no plan.

Olbermann on Rice

No, not a recipe.

On Sunday, commenting on evoking the 2002 Iraq authorization, Sec. of State Rice said: “It would be like saying that after Adolf Hitler was overthrown, we needed to change then, the resolution that allowed the United States to do that, so that we could deal with creating a stable environment in Europe after he was overthrown.”

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann provided a "Special Comment" tonight in response. If you haven't seen it, Think Progress has the video.