White House caught in a loop; Bush afraid newspapers will corrupt his reality

Damn it all to hell. Someone stole my old bike from in front of the house. What's too bad is that I just got the tires fixed on Sunday. I had that one for a very long time. Fortunately tonight I went around along the river. A good last time. It's a surprise it made it this far, all in all...

IN more entertainging news, we are in what could be called a feedback loop of foreign policy. Bush has been paralyzed and his polls are corkscrewing straight to the floor (at a rate of 9 points in 3 weeks). He's polling poorly against any Dem, even that newbie Clark!

Has anyone on this planet noticed that there is no public report about Iraqi WMD from the investigators?? That, in fact, the administration has suppressed the information to avoid political damage??

Here's something else: Bush is actually intimidated by bias in newspapers. That is, he cannot identify and understand their bias. Hence he must depend on his advisors for a portrait of the world. This is pretty amazing, actually. I think we should all wonder how nice it is to have a president who believes that reading through the Post in the morning, say, would endanger the integrity (perceived as accuracy) of his worldview. Erk.

This comes from the happy interview in the White House with FOX News' Brit Hume:

HUME: How do you get your news?
BUSH: I get briefed by Andy Card and Condi in the morning. They come in and tell me. In all due respect, you've got a beautiful face and everything. (????)
I glance at the headlines just to kind of a flavor for what's moving. I rarely read the stories, and get briefed by people who are probably read the news themselves. But like Condoleezza, in her case, the national security adviser is getting her news directly from the participants on the world stage.
HUME: Has that been your practice since day one, or is that a practice that you've...
BUSH: Practice since day one.
HUME: Really?
BUSH: Yes. You know, look, I have great respect for the media. I mean, our society is a good, solid democracy because of a good, solid media. But I also understand that a lot of times there's opinions mixed in with news. And I...
HUME: I won't disagree with that, sir.
BUSH: I appreciate people's opinions, but I'm more interested in news. And the best way to get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world.

How can we view this disaster? How about the Foreign Policy Moebius Strip, via the political cartoon This Modern World.

The cartoon goes well with the latest from Washington writer Josh Marshall who tells us of an administration like a robot that's caught in a loop.

People disagree over how much we should involve our allies or the United Nations in our various military and diplomatic forays abroad. But we?re beyond that now. It?s no longer a matter of which approach is better. The problem is that the White House seems incapable of choosing one over the other and now oscillates back and forth between the two on an almost weekly basis.

For the past six weeks we?ve watched the same sobering pattern recur again and again.

First, some major setback occurs in Baghdad. Next, the White House reacts with a newfound desire to broaden its coalition by bringing in the United Nations and our allies.

When the crunch comes, however, the White House can?t bring itself to make the hard decisions necessary to change the dynamic in Iraq or the United Nations. So everything falls back to the status quo ante until the next bomb blows up in Baghdad.

Last year, many in the administration genuinely did not care what the United Nations or the rest of the world thought about our venture into Iraq. But today, the White House pretty clearly wants some outside infusion of support. And yet the president cannot seem to muster more than insults and threats about U.N. irrelevancy when he speaks to the General Assembly.

Before the speech, when Fox News Channel?s Brit Hume asked the president whether he was willing to cede some political control to the United Nations in exchange for foreign assistance, Bush replied, "I'm not so sure we have to, for starters."

Many of us are familiar with the five stages of grieving identified three decades ago by the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler Ross. As individuals face death or any great loss they go through five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Those stages apply to the demise of major policy initiatives as well and we?re watching that happen now as the White House comes to grips with the collapse of its policy on Iraq. The administration keeps seeing what the problem is but cannot bring itself to take the cure.