“He Has a Terrific Knack of Not Looking through the Rearview Mirror.”

So says Rep. K. Michael Conaway (R-Tex.) of President Bush in Sunday's Washington Post.

Conaway, a "longtime friend who once worked for Bush," meant this as a compliment, and it is -- to a point. Even though I am a historian, I am willing to put the study of history into perspective. Sticking with the metaphor, I don't drive down the highway with tape over my windshield. When you're moving forward, you need to keep your eyes on the road.

But my driving instructor also told me to at least glance in that rearview mirror from time to time. And it is the president's unwillingness to ask hard questions about his past decisions that so undermines his ability to fashion effective policy.

This story hearkens back to a widely-cited article by Ron Suskind, published just before the 2004 election, and particularly to a quote maddeningly attributed to a "senior adviser" to Bush. Suskind writes:

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.''

George W. Bush will leave office on January 20, 2009. He'll be creating his own reality for 567 more days. And there doesn’t appear to be anything that anyone, particularly those of us who “study…how things will sort out,” can do about it.