Something Michael Kinsley just wrote about President Bush reminds me of a famous Hollywood anecdote, an anecdote that I think says a lot about how guys like Bush think. First, here’s Kinsley, wrapping up his recent Slate piece about the Bush economic "plan":

Bush, in a funny way, seems to be a man of ideas. He doesn't have a lot of them himself, but hand him one and he'll run with it, undeterred by opposition, or by subsequent evidence and logic. He has the unreflective person's immunity from irony, that great killer of intellectual passion. Ask him to reconcile his line on Iraq with his line on North Korea and he just gets irritated. Tell him he can't be for tax simplification and offer a Rube Goldberg contraption like this at the same time and he'll say, "Oh, yeah—just watch me."

The anecdote I’m thinking about appeared in Bob Thomas’s biography of Frank Mankiewicz, the screenwriter who wrote Citizen Kane with Orson Welles; Pauline Kael quotes the passage in her essay "Raising Kane":

Cohn began the conversation: "Last night I saw the lousiest picture I’ve seen in years."

He mentioned the title, and one of the more courageous of the producers spoke up: "Why, I saw that picture at the Downtown Paramount, and the audience howled over it. Maybe you should have seen it with an audience."

"That doesn’t make any difference," Cohn replied. "When I’m alone in a projection room, I have a foolproof device for judging whether a picture is good or bad. If my fanny squirms, it’s bad. If my fanny doesn’t squirm, it’s good. It’s as simple as that."

There was a momentary silence, which was filled by Mankiewicz at the end of the table: "Imagine -- the whole world wired to Harry Cohn’s ass!"

Not long ago we heard something similar to this from Bush, as Paul Krugman reminded us earlier this month. In response to a reporter’s question, Bush snapped, "You said we're headed to war in Iraq. I don't know why you say that. I'm the person who gets to decide, not you."

Krugman’s gloss on this statement was: "L'état, c'est moi."

Spend enough years as a member of the managerial class -- specifically, in the highest brackets of that class -- and you may well start thinking and acting and talking this way. You may well assume that no one really has a right to question or challenge anything you do.

And, of course, the whole world -- literally -- is (figuratively) wired to George Bush’s ass. Imagine.