Bush's retreat from reality -- good read

[TimeToGo]

Salon:

Bush's retreat from reality

-- Michelle Goldberg

Even if you thought you knew all there was to know about this administration's retreat from the Enlightenment, it's hard not to shudder while reading "Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush," Ron Suskind's New York Times Magazine cover story. It's long been clear that this administration has a hard time acknowledging reality, but Suskind suggests that Bush and his circle have an active and unabashed aversion to it.

Suskind quotes a senior Bush advisor who derides him, along with most journalists, experts and government technocrats, as part of the "reality-based community." As Suskind tells it, the advisor described this group as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernable reality," an approach this administration evidently sneers at.

"I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principals and empiricism," Suskind writes. "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."

It's considered unfashionably shrill to refer to the Bush administration as fascistic, but this is pretty clearly the language of totalitarianism.

SNIP

Very worthy -- go to:

http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room//index.html

[kentuck]

1. The desire for power overrides everything else....

Even though his advisers and Cabinet knew him to be incompetent for the position he acquired...

[The Traveler]

2. Guess I am unfashionable ...

for I hold if they walk like fascists and talk like facsists they just might be fuckin' fascsists.

Or maybe they have just been off their meds too long ...

[Carla in Ca]

3. LOL...nicely said.

[shraby]

4. Was that what Bush meant in the last debate

when he said "I know how the world works"

[The Traveler]

5. I think so

a lesson he learned when Daddy kept him out of Vietnam and out of jail ...