Bob Herbert has taken leave of reality

Bob Herbert at the NYTimes is a good man. It was he who exposed a real scandal in a small town in Texas, involving a sheriff who was routinely arresting innocent black people, including a one night bust that pretty much cleaned out the town. (No links on this one. Sorry, but it happened about a year ago.) It's sad, then, to see someone become so disconnected from reality. In a Nov. 19, 2004 op-ed, Herbert went on a completely unanchored rant about Bush's temerity in placing on his cabinet people he trusts, whom he knows will carry out his agenda. (And I'll say again, Bush did win this election.) Tidbits from this "article": "Competence has never been highly regarded by the fantasists of the George W. Bush administration. In the Bush circle, no less than in your average youth gang, loyalty is everything. The big difference, of course, is that the administration is far more dangerous than any gang. History will show that the Bush crowd of incompetents brought tremendous amounts of suffering to enormous numbers of people. The amount of blood being shed is sickening, and there is no end to the grief in sight." Boy, I bet Herbert's one of those people who checked out the Canada website. "I look at the catastrophe in Iraq, the fiscal debacle here at home, the extent to which loyalty trumps competence at the highest levels of government, the absence of a coherent vision of the future for the U.S. and the world, and I wonder, with a sense of deep sadness, where the adults have gone." Now, it's the paragraph above that bothers me. "Catastrophe in Iraq?" What catastrophe? It was not a bloodless war, but what is? In over a year and a half, we've lost only a few more than a thousand troops. Each is an individual tragedy, but collectively, it's one of the neatest, cleanest takeovers of a country in recorded history. Yes, the bloody-minded insurgents are still out there, but we are cutting their numbers, cutting their financing, cutting their materiels -- what more could one want. "The fiscal debacle here at home?" What "fiscal debacle?" Thanks to the burst dot.com bubble, which had nothing to do with Bush, plus the fallout from 9/11, Bush received a terribly sick economy. Despite a war, he's turned it into one of the shortest recessions ever. "The absence of a coherent vision for the U.S.?" Bush has an extremely coherent vision -- it's just not Herbert's. It's also a vision that 51% of the country buys into, for better or worse. It seems to be that the only proven fantasist revealed in this article is Herbert himself.