So, I came across this article titled
Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush that was in the New York Times Magazine back in 2004 (a great read written by Ron Suskind -
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html). I know this may be old news to some, but I hadn't read it before - and, though it was all a horrible reminder of the Bush years, I found one excerpt particularly shocking:
"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.''It's not so much that I'm shocked that this is how those evil assholes operate, just that this person delineated it so clearly and without a hint of remorse or hesitation. The reason I point it out is that absolutely nothing has changed, yet they're still, by and large, allowed to get away with their own manufactured reality.
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