Blinkered

Wow, I stop reading the news for a few days and now even Jim Hoagland is throwing his hands up over Bush's "strategy" for Iraq:

Both documents betray a willingness to see the world as you would like it to be rather than as it is, and a readiness to hope that the gap goes unnoticed or unexamined. With all respect, sir, that is not leadership. Leaders address inconvenient reality and then seek explicit and reasoned support from the nation for dealing with it.

Agreed; though I'm not sure an appeal to reality will do the trick. To quote Marcel Proust: "The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; as it was not they that engendered those beliefs, so they are powerless to destroy them."