Secrets of Make me a Commentator!!! revealed!

Not that this should come as a huge surprise. I have a 15 minutes till lunch; and I haven't read anything I want to write on. I want another post, but don't want to do a ton of work finding an article and critiquing it. What do I do?

Pull up Paul Krugman's latest article, praise his impressive writing, lift a quote, and call it a day. Easy.

His latest article concerns the Bush administrations ability to willfully ignore what doesn't fit their gameplan.

How did the occupation of Iraq go so wrong? (The security situation has deteriorated to the point where there are no safe places: a bomb was discovered on Tuesday in front of a popular restaurant inside the Green Zone.)

The insulation of officials from reality is central to the story. They wanted to believe Ahmad Chalabi's promises that we'd be welcomed with flowers; nobody could tell them different. They wanted to believe - months after everyone outside the administration realized that we were facing a large, dangerous insurgency and needed more troops - that the attackers were a handful of foreign terrorists and Baathist dead-enders; nobody could tell them different.

. . . The point is that in the real world, as opposed to the political world, ignorance isn't strength. A leader who has the political power to pretend that he's infallible, and uses that power to avoid ever admitting mistakes, eventually makes mistakes so large that they can't be covered up. And that's what's happening to Mr. Bush.

That is one value of the debates; it exposes these contradictions. In effect, President Bush and Senator Kerry are presenting two different realities, and it is up to the voters to decide which one seems more realistic.