Many liberals think President George W. Bush is stupid. After four years, however, the evidence suggests that the president is not unintelligent, but rather profoundly uncurious about the world and quite dangerously disengaged from reality.

Before the Iraq war, several members of the administration confidently remarked that the invasion would be “a cakewalk” and that troops “would be welcomed as liberators.” Now, nearly one and a half years after “Mission Accomplished,” Iraq teeters on the brink of civil war.

But hey, freedom’s on the march. In fact, freedom is marching so hard in Afghanistan that the local warlords have regained control of much of the country; the heroin-producing poppy plant is back in full bloom and Medicins sans Frontieres, a humanitarian relief organization that aids refugees during civil war, disasters and general catastrophe, has pulled out of the country because it’s too dangerous.

It’s not just foreign policy that the president tends to view through rose-colored glasses. To inflate job numbers, the Bush administration reclassified fast-food jobs as “manufacturing” jobs, allowing the administration to claim that its trade policies are producing new “manufacturing” jobs even as the real ones go overseas. These few examples are literally the tip of the iceberg.

But then again, what did the country expect from a man who doesn’t read newspapers? During an interview with Brit Hume last year, Bush said he doesn’t read them, but is rather “briefed by people who have probably read the news themselves.”

The people whispering in the president’s ear, however, seem to have a rather tenuous grasp on the world as well. Journalist Ron Suskind describes meeting one of Bush’s aides after Suskind wrote an unflattering article about the president:

“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities which you can study too and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’”

Compare that to a scene in George Orwell’s novel “1984,” in which a political dissident is being “re-educated”:

“You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident … But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth.”

In two weeks, the administration may be in for a harsh reality check.

Columns reflect the opinion of the author and not necessarily that of the Northern Star staff.