Does He Even Understand?

Fred Kaplan looks at two specific questions posed to the President at his O.C. busting press conference the other night: What's the deal with the Iraqi insurgents' steady growth and determiniation; and what the hell is going on with North Korea, and what's America planning on doing about it?

The President, of course, spewed a strange line of abstraction for both: In Iraq, those pesky insurgents are tyrants that hate democracy; in Korea, America is tired of being the sole voice, and things have to change but still have one voice and...

Kaplan asks two questions about these replies: Does the President believe what he's saying? and Does the President, regardles of his belief level, grasp the power structures in either of these places and understand any of the dynamics?

It's related to a comment Jigga left about Bush's statement on religion in politics- does he even grasp the meaning of the words he's using, in many cases?

And again, I wonder if it even matters. He hasn't strayed from this method for his tenure. He injects some black-and-white ideologically based almost-decisive term and it becomes something resembling policy- but do any of these policies come close to dealing with the real problems, or are they simply dealing with Bush's projects of what he wishes the problems were?