Freedom is on the march, and victory in the glorious war lies right around the corner. Josh Marshall looks at shrub’s Alice-in-Wonderland view of things, and wonders how it’s possible.

We’re safer with Saddam in prison; America is safer. The critics are pessimists.

These aren’t quotations. But phrases like these are the stock phrases of the president and the rest of his campaign. They filled the recent Republican convention in New York. Actually, on Thursday President Bush was speaking in exactly this vein: “Freedom is on the march.”

But as yesterday’s piece in the Times made clear, that’s exactly the opposite of what the government — or rather the people in the government paid to analyze these things — actually believes. A new and still highly classified National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq says that the best case scenario for the country over the next eighteen months is drift, along more or less the lines that it’s at right now. The worst case scenario is all-out civil war. The middle ground is spiralling extremism and fragmentation — basically a continuation of the evolution, or rather devolution, we’ve seen over the last year.

There have been a raft of new findings over the last week or so which dramatize or confirm this finding. But the truth is we don’t really need anyone to tell us this.

It’s always possible to posit ‘optimism’ up until the point when the whole place actually erupts spontaneously into hellfire. But to any thinking individual it’s clear and it’s been clear for some time that our whole enterprise in Iraq is going extremely poorly, by pretty much every concievable measure.

And yet the president just says none of this is true. Things are going well. Yes, things are difficult, he says. But we’re on the right track and things keep getting better. Dan Bartlett today said that Democrats are just showing their pessimism: “President Bush gets his briefings from commanders on the ground. He has reason for his optimism because of the enormous amount of progress we have made.”

The president is simply in denial. Or he’s willing to keep burning through the US Army and the Marine Corps to avoid admitting the failure of his policies or even the obvious fact that the situation in Iraq is deteriorating terribly.

Today another suicide bomber just exploded himself in Baghdad killing at least a dozen people. The country is continuing the slide into chaos and violence. President Bush says we’re on the the right track. Freedom is on the march.

Words and excuses meet incompetence, chaos and death. That’s what this election is about.

Trying to get into bush’s head, to see the world as he does is no easy task. Nothing makes any sense. As Alice exclaims to the Mad Hatter, “Their books look like our books, only the words go the wrong way!”