One of the things I admire the most about Bill Clinton is that he can say, "Yes, I made mistakes." Our current president seems to be pathologically programmed not only to see no mistakes he's made, but certainly not admit to it if one unavoidably gets his attention. That's a character flaw, and a dangerous one. When I pray for Bush, it's the primary thing I ask of God: "Open his eyes to the harm he's done, open his mind to non-military solutions, open his heart to work for peace and justice."

So, I was disheartened to hear him say "critics who believe the Iraq war has worsened terrorism are naive and mistaken..." God's answer to my prayer for him must be, "Not yet."

As Howard Fineman of Newsweek said yesterday in his comments on MSNBC's Countdown: "Well, you do have parallel universes here, Keith. You‘ve got a red universe and a blue universe, to use the current shorthand. But I think there‘s still a few people left in America who care about the facts, and those are key voters, undecided voters. You may argue that in a midterm election, those people who aren‘t involved don‘t vote. I think there are a lot of American people who don‘t quite belong in either of those universes, who are listening very carefully about the parallel universes we inhabit."

Maybe it's the reason so many Republicans are distancing themselves from his madness. The posturing, the pretension, the patronizing platitudes have become implausible and unpopular. The incompetence and malfeasance are too glaringly obvious. The emperor has no clothes and they can no longer hide that fact from anyone but him.