My mother's Alzheimer's disease has greatly worsened; it is unbearable to see how this once quick-witted woman is now being deceived by her own brain.

In one moment she was crying, "I'm sick because I need to get out, but your dad won't take me anywhere."

When I asked where she wanted to go, she exploded, "It's too damn hot to go anywhere. Your father always wants to take me out. But it's too damn hot."

She has no idea of her complete self-contradictions, the utter lack of logic she is displaying. Her grammar is perfect, but the ideas are rooted in confusion at best, delusion at worst.

Since coming home from my long sad visit, I keep finding evidence in the news of cognitive dissonance that makes me wonder if some sort of collective Alzheimer's has been unleashed.Angry callers have termed me "anti-American" and "un-American" with Orwellian tones. One reader, offended by my "sniveling about Abu Ghraib," accused me of thinking "poorly of our military" - when clearly my anger has always been pointed directly at the perpetrators of abuse, not the troops they endanger.

The actions of those at Abu Ghraib, which she discounted as "pranks" on "cold-blooded killers," are fueling those who once supported the United States to take up arms against our soldiers.

So many are ignoring an essential reality: The vast majority of the prisoners were not terrorists at all but innocent Iraqis. Innocent men and boys were tortured. They were so innocent that the prison has released 5,000 of them since the abuse was uncovered. Just think - if these were actual terrorists, as that reader alleged, then the Bush administration is dreadfully wrong in releasing them.

It's a complete logical fallacy, yet it is escaping so many.

So is another major one: We keep hearing how we need the war in Iraq so we can fight the terrorists on the streets of Baghdad instead of here.

(This rhetoric was tested by Republican pollster Frank Lunz and he advocated it to the administration for how well it played; by the way, he allegedly advocated using the phrase "9/11" whenever the war in Iraq was mentioned, to insinuate a relationship between them even though none exists.)

Already we've spent $120 billion on the war in Iraq, and that figure is still growing. But supposedly that's OK because it's keeping the terrorists away from here.

Hmmm. Consider this from the conservative Washington Times just last February: "The intelligence and law enforcement officials say dozens of Islamic extremists have already been routed through Europe to Muslim communities in the United States - al-Qaida sleeper cells are believed to be operating in 40 states - awaiting orders and funding for new attacks in the United States."

Wouldn't you rather the billions of dollars be available to find and disable these terrorists already in our midst? What attention is being applied? Not much, and that is appalling.

Consider that, according to longtime CIA agent Michael Scheuer, the CIA has fewer people trying to track Osama bin Laden now than it did on Sept. 11, 2001. He wrote a scathing letter to Congress that was read into the record just this past week.

Now consider how the U.S. Treasury has had more agents assigned to find Cuban embargo violators than to track down who's funding al-Qaida.

Consider that those supporting Bush keep trying to frame his opponents as the left fringe, while one of the most vocal critics is conservative Pat Buchanan, who in his new book, "Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency," shows that the war in Iraq is "the greatest strategic blunder in 40 years."

Consider that the outgoing commander of the U.S. Marines in Iraq has said the deadly violence in Fallujah was fomented because the administration second-guessed his leadership, forced his hand to attack at the wrong time and then vacillated when it shouldn't have.

Consider what conservative Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said last Tuesday on CNN's "NewsNight": "We've made a lot of mistakes since the fall of Baghdad. We underestimated the level of the insurgency. ... Once you say you're going to take Fallujah, you better take Fallujah. What we've done is we've allowed pockets of resistance to grow. We've been less than decisive."

"Less than decisive" - this is a Republican describing the policies of a president who holds his decisiveness as his ace in the hole. Now that's cognitive dissonance.

Sherri Byrand writes a weekly column for the Sheboygan Press. E-mail: byrand@earthlink.net

Copyright 2004 The Capital Times

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