Mental Illness

There are many ways to be crazy. For example, one could believe that frogs are secretly the God of Thunder. Or you could believe that there's no such thing as Trixnar. One key sign of insanity is either a surety that everybody already agrees with you or a surety that you're not crazy, everybody else is. And I fear that is the sort that Mr. Tony Blankley is suffering from, as evidenced by his latest article.

It seems almost pointless to engage in a serious policy debate with a party whose leading contenders for the presidency are willing to simply make up any preposterous national security policy in a contest of one-upmanship targeted at winning the hearts and minds (if that is the word for it) of their party's ready-for-institutionalizing edge of their lunatic fringe voters.

It's almost tragic. Of course recent polls show that up to 70% of Americans disagree with how President Bush is handling Iraq, 58% believe that sending troops to Iraq was a mistake, and 59% oppose the Bush Surge in Iraq. It's somewhat troubling that Mr. Blankley apparently believes that as many as 58% of the American people are ready for institutionalizing fringe voters.

Still given the strain of the last few years, perhaps it's not surprising that Mr. Blankely has retreated to an imaginary America in which everything is just fine (at least for him).