Delusions of Empire

[shraby]

Ron Suskind, former Wall Street Journal reporter and author of The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neil, has a piece in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine that is the talk of the internet, and with good reason: it is a devastating portrait of this 'faith-based" presidency, with its religio-cultural idiosyncrasies and foibles. But it is not only that. Suskind manages to capture, in a series of vivid anecdotes, the political psychopathology that motivates this administration and shapes its perception. Here is the money quote:

"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.''"

Anyone who believes that governments create reality is living in a fantasy world, and is surely no conservative, neo- or otherwise, either politically or temperamentally. As the conservative philosopher Claes Ryn has pointed out,

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<http://antiwar.com/justin/>

[juliagoolia]

1. These people are making me thing we need white coats

with very long sleeve and buckles on the back for all the folks in the whitehouse.

[izzie]

2. Well yar I read that and I think it is true,

Ever lived with a person that was born-again or based every thing on faith? I have and it is very hard on those people and the ones around them. My friend lost it and still has not come out of the depression it has produced plus that family has been almost destroyed. I even found it easier to just shut my mind to it and look the other way as I could not do one thing. I even laughed when I saw this coming in the US. I did not believe it could or would happen yet here it is. It is not easy to reason with the black and white people of the world. They are right and it leaves you with no reason you can use.If it is true that 40% of American's are born again that is a real scary thing.The only thing is these people do have to live in some what the real world where as Bush lives in this bubble.