slacktivist: Count me in

Oct 18, 2004

Count me in

From Ron Suskind's must-read article, "Without a Doubt," in Sunday's New York Times Magazine:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

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.''

The summer of 2002 was also when this blog began, motivated, among other things, by the belief that "solutions emerge from [the] judicious study of discernible reality." So count me in.

Posted by Fred Clark on Oct 18, 2004 at 04:01 PM | Permalink

Comments

Indeed.

Posted by: Peatey | Oct 18, 2004 at 04:21 PM

Wow so our allegedly Christian president is revealed as a follower of Nitzsche and the Will to Power. Charming.

Posted by: Chris | Oct 18, 2004 at 04:31 PM

this is an incredible article.

you are going to comment on the winsdor report, right?

Posted by: Cassidy | Oct 18, 2004 at 11:42 PM

No, no, I was reading the blogs to take a *break* from reading 1984.

Posted by: Vassilissa | Oct 19, 2004 at 03:14 AM

This article makes me wonder once again if W actually believes in God, or if he just believes in W.

Posted by: cjmr | Oct 19, 2004 at 10:13 AM

There were several things I don't think I had actually seen printed yet, and every time I do see a new one, I am aware of how surprised I am to see it allowed to be printed at all--because every day seems more like a new day in the "life" of a police state; so I wonder how secure you have to feel to write anything about this creature.

I did some searching on people who had called Bush an "asshole," and apparently there were several hundred thousand--too many for it to be the stimulus for a witch hunt that would not backfire. Whether the same thing is true for calling him a "whore" is something I intend to look into (the list is probably much smaller, since it's unlikely that the disconnect from the literal would have occurred, there's no time for anything but fake certainty anymore--and he's certainly unattractive, with a well-known fear of horses.)

So the senior Bush aide's remarks in your quote from Suskind's piece are new to me: I didn't know that anyone would have actually said the things about the 'reality-based community' and 'that's not how the world works anymore,' even though it's been clear enough that that is what is going on. This proves that there may be no ethics in the administration, but that there surely are brains, because this was a cold-blooded description that told the truth about how false they were going to be.

But remember: That was a little over 2 years ago, the summer of 2002. They've 'created' a lot of 'new worlds' by now, and one of them is to say a little less about the Big Theme Park they operate.

The summer of 2002 is a very long time ago by now.
Recent dates always enter the distant past much faster than they used to.

In two more year's time, given the likelihood of some means to secure a Bush victory, even the most visible writers could be thinking that it is about as safe as it was under Mao or in Phnom Penh to be an intellectual.

The other articulate shocker was by Mark McKinnon from a little later in 2002, which explained why Krugman, Suskind, and others in the reality-based community have much less effect than we think they surely must have. The Bush people don't read them (except for smarties like the aides) but that we knew. That efforts are being made to cause fewer and fewer to read them would doubtless be the case, since Cheney said the NYTimes was 'outrageous' to merely report what the 9/11 Commission concluded this past summer--and there has been far more talk of the 'invasion of Mary Cheney's privacy' than there ever was even of Cheney's remarks about Kerry's "sensitive approach to terrorism" and his "unfitness."

No matter how realistic Kerry becomes about how he has to fight Bush, they are so violent he can probably never catch up. And of course the Mary Cheney thing was in no way meant to honour the Cheneys, it was meant precisely as the Republicans assessed it, to reveal the Republicans' filthy hypocrisy and divert votes to Kerry. The Republicans--so sensitive--are shocked that anyone would use their own tactics to win. God forbid the Democrats should be so goddam impolite about the dyke they got stuck with in their inner circle. It's so obvious that it is Mary Cheney they are furious with, as Hick Theme Park is taking no homos.

There was also Bruce Bartlett's "He understands them [al-Qaida and the Islamic fundamentalists] because he's just like them." And Christie Whitman also re-whoring out, claiming she asked for "facts" in May, 2003 (which is not any longer "only a year ago in May, 2003," but now "long ago in May, 2003") and now saying she never said these things. A lot of people do not want, in direct proportion to how long-in-the-tooth they are, to miss [turning] as many tricks as they once imagine they did.

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