Poor Chimpy! He finds everything "unacceptable" now! But after six years of his regime's ignorance, incompetence and corruption, what did he expect?

"The notion that President Bush is not just in denial," writes Dan Froomkin in his washingtonpost.com "White House Briefing," "but is petulantly in denial, is taking on greater credence thanks to two recent Washington Post stories."

One is the piece we flagged for yesterday's Quote of the Day, about the seemingly impervious-to-reality confidence of the president and his fella Karl Rove regarding 2006 Republican congressional election prospects, which has astonished most of the rest of their party.

The other is a Friday piece in which R. Jeffrey Smith, with research assistance from Lucy Shackelford, noted that "President Bush finds the world around him increasingly 'unacceptable'":

In speeches, statements and news conferences this year, the president has repeatedly declared a range of problems "unacceptable," including rising health costs, immigrants who live outside the law, North Korea's claimed nuclear test, genocide in Sudan and Iran's nuclear ambitions.

Bush's decision to lay down blunt new markers about the things he deems intolerable comes at an odd time, a phase of his presidency in which all manner of circumstances are not bending to his will: national security setbacks in North Korea and Iraq, a Congress that has shrugged its shoulders at his top domestic initiatives, a favorability rating mired below 40 percent. . . .

Having a president call something "unacceptable" is not the same as having him order U.S. troops into action. But foreign policy experts say the word is one of the strongest any leader can deploy, since it both broadcasts a national position and conveys an implicit threat to take action if his warnings are disregarded. . . .

Froomkin adds:

All of this reminded one faithful reader of my column of that running joke in the movie The Princess Bride, where the evil Vizzini, played by Wallace Shawn, repeatedly splutters "inconceivable!" in the fact of the implacable advance of the Dread Pirate Roberts. Eventually, Mandy Patinkin as Inigo Montoya tells him: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."