From The Huffington Post today, an entry by Justin Frank:

With every passing week, President Bush marches deeper and deeper into a world of his own making. His August move to Crawford and his refusal/inability to meet with Cindy Sheehan are only the latest steps in that long retreat from the real world. Central to Bush’s world is an iron will which demands that external reality be changed to conform to his personal view of how things are.

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But recognition only raises the deeper question: why, in the face of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, does Bush persist in this way? How does it help him to continue repeating himself to a nation that increasingly believes he is lying on several fronts? How does his refusal to meet with Cindy Sheehan help him?

There is a two-part answer to this question: First, as far as Bush is concerned, he is telling the truth; as Madeleine Albright recently said to Columbia Magazine: “the most serious problem is that George Bush now believes what he says.” Like many of my hospitalized patients, Bush has created a vast, detailed but vague delusional system he feels compelled to maintain at all costs. This system helps him manage the terrifying anxiety that threatens to make his already endangered inner world more chaotic.

The second answer is made clear by his reaction to Cindy Sheehan: he believes his lies because he feels his survival depends on it. He cannot help her mourn; he cannot take responsibility for his destructiveness. If he could he would. His inner need to be right would not just be modified; his entire internal mental structure would be shattered.

The possibility that ought to scare the bejeesus out of everybody is, what will this guy do when his carefully constructed, pampered fantasy life, through which he is dragging ever one of us, comes flying apart? That’s a black hole that may suck us all in and we may not know it until we’re over the event horizon and it’s too late to do much about it.