"Either extraordinary self-confidence or out of touch with reality. I can't tell you which."

as his long-time friends and allies jump ship, and as everything he has worked for appears doomed, george w. bush, certainly not out of intellectual curiosity and almost certainly out of inner desperation, is calling in historians and scholars hoping to find justification if not vindication...

Burdened by an unrelenting war, challenged by an opposition Congress, defeated just last week on immigration, his last major domestic priority, Bush remains largely locked inside the fortress of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in the seventh year of a presidency turned sour. He still travels, making speeches to friendly audiences and attending summit meetings, such as this weekend's Kennebunkport talks with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. But he rarely goes out to dinner, and he no longer plays golf, except occasionally chipping at Camp David, where, as at his Texas ranch, he can find refuge.

"I don't know how he copes with it," said Donald Burnham Ensenat, a friend for 43 years who just stepped down as State Department protocol officer. Rep. K. Michael Conaway (R-Tex.), another longtime friend who once worked for Bush, said he looks worn down. "It's a marked difference in his physical appearance," Conaway said. "It's an incredibly heavy load. When you ask men and women to take risks, to send them into war knowing they might not come home, that's got to be an incredible burden to have on your shoulders."

[...]

And yet Bush does not come across like a man lamenting his plight. In public and in private, according to intimates, he exhibits an inexorable upbeat energy that defies the political storms. ... He still acts as if he were master of the universe, even if the rest of Washington no longer sees him that way.

"You don't get any feeling of somebody crouching down in the bunker," said Irwin M. Stelzer, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who was part of one group of scholars who met with Bush. "This is either extraordinary self-confidence or out of touch with reality. I can't tell you which."

can i venture a guess...? it may not be until he either leaves office or is thrown out, but, eventually, inevitably, reality will come crashing down on george w. bush, and, as a human being with compassion for my fellow human beings, i can't imagine the pain of the mental and emotional turmoil that he will experience... certainly one of the most painful realizations will be how his personal weaknesses have been used and manipulated, and how he has been only a totemic prop, the sock puppet carefully groomed and placed to carry out the agenda of those who really call the shots... it will be a terrible denouement, but, nevertheless, a completely appropriate one for a man, endowed like all his fellow men, with the gift of free will and the power to choose...

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