Born Again - Again

On Sunday, October 22, 2006 George W. Bush was born again - again. His re-birth was pre-recorded, but the television audience saw it happen before their very eyes between 9 and 10 AM Eastern Standard Time on ABC. He told the interviewer, also called George, that "we've never been 'stay-the-course'" in Iraq. Had the interviewer been a psychiatrist (or a real reporter), he would have had Bush's record at hand, and would have found that Bush has regularly said we would "stay the course" in Iraq.

What does this disclaimer mean? It means at least two things: Bush's words are meaningless to him, and that he utters them in interviews and press conferences solely because it is required of presidents and campaigners; second, it again reveals Bush's pattern of dismissing his past when events prove too uncomfortable for him. Normally he indignantly denies the past -"Kenny who?" or "I never met with that lobbyist, Mr. Abramoff." At other times he's sullenly indifferent, as when he said "What's the difference?" when Diane Sawyer's probed him about not the finding the WMDs he had insisted were in Iraq.

To a psychiatrist - and to everyone else, for that matter - who takes words seriously, Bush's statement that "we've never been 'stay-the-course'" means that he is delusional about himself and therefore able to split off his own past completely from memory. It also means that he truly believes that the American people will also forget what he said in the past - an even more profound case for his being unfit to remain President.

We have heard his delusions before, but they have always been about external events such as global warming, how the war is going in Iraq and Afghanistan, and how our economy is faring. We have never heard him flatly dismiss, in such a clear and carefree way, his own exact words. At this rate, he might suddenly wake up one day to say that he was never even elected President in the first place. But that's unlikely, since in fact, it may actually be true.