A pressed conference

[BobcatJH]

To watch President Bush's press conference Tuesday morning was to watch a man squarely at odds with reality. We saw Bush the defiant. Bush the angry. Bush the liar. Never has the man seemed less in charge of America.

Taking tough questions from the White House press corps, the president laughed in the face of a grim reality, blamed the media for the disaster in Iraq and boasted of progress that simply isn't there.

The long, slow march toward irrelevance is over. Bush is officially a lame duck. He doesn't matter anymore. Today proved that.

It was sad that the president couldn't even speak for a minute without blaming the media for the unmitigated disaster in Iraq. The last time I checked, Mr. President, the media wasn't responsible for more than 2,300 Americans dying in Iraq. The media hasn't operated secret prisons. The media hasn't violated human rights. The media hasn't used chemical weapons. You have, Mr. President. And no amount of spin can change that fact. No blame gaming can change the bottom line: This was your disaster.

When he wasn't blaming the media, he was confronting them. Perhaps the most heated exchange today took place between Bush and Helen Thomas. When she found his answers to her question about why he went to war unsatisfactory, Bush rudely glared at Thomas, repeatedly asking if he could finish. Thomas, apparently, had broken an unwritten White House rule under which no reporters are allowed to question the president when his lies set off their bullshit detectors. No moment better served as a metaphor for the Bush presidency than that callous dismissal of dissent.

Bush's departure from reality was no more obvious than when asked about his warrantless wiretapping program. No sooner had Fox News reporter Carl Cameron asked Bush to respond to the calls for censure than Bush erected a straw man of massive proportions. The president wondered aloud why Democrats hadn't simply come out and said that they didn't support spying on terrorists.

What he's missing, of course, is that no elected official is against tracking or fighting global terrorism. This isn't about that. This is about breaking the law when he didn't have to. This is about taking away civil liberties in the name of protection. This is about a program much larger than reported and with greater implications than previously known. This administration expects honesty from its citizens. Shouldn't we expect the same from the administration?

Bush's affect today was telling. He appeared defiant in the face of reality. He laughed uncomfortably when it wasn't appropriate. He scowled when challenged on assertions. It's clear that this president isn't used to being confronted with divergent opinions. It's also clear that he's uneasy when not asked scripted questions in staged situations.

Bush seemed as though he was responding to a world that doesn't exist. A world in which progress is being made in Iraq. A world in which he has a plan to succeed. A world in which everyone is to blame for what's going wrong except the people in charge, namely him. Today he created villains that don't exist, enemies made more out of rhetoric than reality. It was almost sad to see him attempt to tilt at those fictitious windmills. Almost.

If today proved anything, it is that America is beginning to tune out this president. He simply doesn't matter anymore. He is irrelevant now and the sooner we can move on from him and make this world better ourselves, the better. We must realize that we've been abandoned by our president. Help isn't on its way from the administration. It's up to us to fix things.

"I'm kind of stalling for time here," Bush said at one point, appearing as though he were in need of an escape hatch. On a day where answers were few and the half-truths came in abundance, no truer words were spoken.