Cost of refusal to deal with reality can be measured in lives.

One of the little mental applets I run in the background of my mind as a general rule, is trying to estimate the difference between some kind of objective reality, and how we as individuals or as a species decide to view events. Certainly the cost is in some kind of proportion to the difference. To borrow from a very old phrase, if you cannot tell the difference between shit and shinola, you will have very stinky shoes.

In this case, president Obama seems unable or unwilling to recognize who the enemy is with respect to the shooter at Fort Hood. This very refusal, it is now clear as day, is exactly the reason this attack happened. Everyone knew that this man was sympathetic to Islam and it’s goals and political ambitions. He was already under investigation for his terrorist ties among other things. But political correctness made it impossible for him to be removed from his position of power, access, and authority and ultimatly to the deaths of over a dozen US servicemen and injury to dozens more.

President Clinton for similar reasons was unable to prevent the attack on the WTC on September 11 2001 because his administration was not prepared to deal with the facts of the first attack on that same building by that same group for the same reasons less than a decade earlier.

For each of us, our refusal to admit where reality ends and our fantasies begin has a personal cost. Sometimes in mere money but as often in health and lifespan such as smoking or other habits we may cling to. But in a leader, the cost is exponential and to all of us.

During WW2, Adolph Hitler had a curtain built into his car so that if he was forced to drive through a bombed out area, he could draw his curtain and would not have to see the devastation wreaked on the German people. When Churchill was told about German rocket damage, he would take a car to the spot immediately and examine what the Nazi forces had done in order to best asses the damage and better determine the right course of action.

It is likely this one thing more than any other that won the war for the allies and against the Nazis. Reality, trumps fantasy when it comes to tactics.

Obama needs to have this explained to him.

Or perhaps it is as Shakespeare so eloquently stated it in the character of the king of Denmark in Hamlet:

“Madness in great ones, must not unwatched go”

Eeyore for Vlad