To the Cronies Go the Spoils--Gene Lyons' latest....

[Gloria]

To the cronies go the spoils
Gene Lyons

Posted on Wednesday, September 28, 2005

URL: http://www.nwanews.com/story.php?paper=adg&storyid=129854

" It ain’t what you don’t know that will hurt you, it’s what you think
you know that ain’t so. "—Will Rogers

The most telling description of the Bush administration may have come
from a White House aide who used the term" reality-based" as an insult.
According to journalist Ron Suskind, who described the incident in a
2004 New York Times Magazine article, the aide mocked the stuffy,
pedantic, presumably liberal view "that solutions problems] emerge from... judicious study of discernible reality." "
That’s not the way the world really works anymore, "he added." 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. "Well, history’s actors are suddenly
hunting for a revised script. According to The Washington Post, with the
president’s poll numbers sinking, White House aides" who never betrayed
self-doubt now talk in private of failures selling the American people
on the Iraq war, the president’s Social Security plan and his response
to Hurricane Katrina. "

We’ve had quite enough salesmanship, thank you. Historically a pragmatic
people resistant to abstract ideology, Americans want" actors" who
resolve the nation’s problems, not thespians. Many are waking to the
reality that a one-party Republican regime has left us stuck with a
government of ideologues and cronies who, when things get tough, sound
awfully like Marxist apparatchiks chanting the party line.

Actually, that line’s gotten somewhat muddled since Hurricane Katrina.
With President Bush jetting back and forth to the Gulf Coast in a
frantic effort to show concern, GOP robo-pundits in the nation’s great
metropolitan newspapers have taken to portraying FEMA’s failures as an
inevitable result of government ineptitude.

Funny, that’s not what they thought about Bush’s utopian scheme to
democratize the Middle East. But hold that thought.

New York Times columnist David Brooks even resorted to the old Soviet
device of calling White House critics mentally ill, describing Democrats
as "psychologically aggrieved," " wrapped in their own rage" and
displaying "anger in almost clinical form." I guess nobody he loved
drowned.

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