Infantilisme

Robert Fisk in The Independent (via Selves and Others):

I wonder sometimes if we have not entered a new age of what the French call infantilisme. I admit I am writing these words on the lecture circuit in Paris where pretty much every political statement - including those of Messrs Chirac, Sarkozy, de Villepin et al - might fall under this same title. But the folk I am referring to, of course, are George W Bush, Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara and - a newcomer to the Fisk Hall of Childishness - President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.

For as someone who has to look at the eviscerated corpses of Palestine and Israel, the murdered bodies in the garbage heaps of Iraq, the young women shot through the head in the Baghdad morgue, I can only shake my head in disbelief at the sheer, unadulterated, lazy bullshit - let's call a spade a spade - which is currently emerging from our great leaders.

There was a time - yes, I know about o tempora o mores - when the Great and the Good spoke with a voice of authority, albeit mendacious, rather than mediocrity; when too many lies spelled a ministerial resignation or two. But today we seem to live on two levels: reality and myth....