Yesterday I was talking to a friend who is pro-war but increasingly ambivalent about what's become of our venture in Iraq.

And we were speculating -- not rhetorically but in some real sense thinking out loud -- about how the president and his top aides could have ignored so many signs for so long that things were going seriously wrong.

Then you see something like this, and everything becomes a bit clearer.

Asked about the National Intelligence Estimate he received two months ago, which painted a bleak outlook for Iraq, the president said the CIA was "just guessing ... The Iraqi citizens are defying the pessimistic predictions."

In one ear and out the other.

Doesn't that tell you a lot about how we got to this juncture?

As Andrew Sullivan I think suggests in this post, the president and I dare say many of his supporters have little ability to distinguish between resolution, optimism and denial.