"No longer understand, much less believe."

Whiskey Bar: The Sixteen Acre Ditch:

When the public discourse on Edward R. Murrow's old network consists of Katie Couric introducing Rush Limbaugh's buffoonish views, you know the intellectual and ideological rot is well advanced -- maybe not quite as far as the Soviet Union in the '80s, but getting there. One of my favorite books about the Soviet collapse was titled "The Age of Delirium" which I think perfectly captured the progressive insanity of a system that could no longer even understand, much less believe, its own lies. I think of that book practically every time George W. Bush or Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld open their mouths in public.