Is Bush Making Reality or Just a Mess?
Bush's aides like to flatter their boss with nonsense about his greatness. This makes it easier for Cheney and Rumsfeld to do prettry much as they please.
If our media and Congress were more concerned about results than process and politics, we would have noticed more than two years ago that Osama bin Laden still had not been captured, the job in Afghanistan was still unfinished, the talks in North Korea were going nowhere, the case for war in Iraq was based on conscious fraud and Bush had no exit plan for our troops in Iraq. Has anything changed? Yes, some members of the Bush Administration are apparently talking about a military bombing strike against Iraq.
George Packer, in his book, The Assassins' Gate, reminds us of the hyperbole that Bush aides use when describing the president:
As Bush continues to 'create reality,' we in the reality-based community are indeed studying the growing mess that Bush is creating. If the town fool somehow becomes mayor, there comes a point when the town has to stop listening.
If our media and Congress were more concerned about results than process and politics, we would have noticed more than two years ago that Osama bin Laden still had not been captured, the job in Afghanistan was still unfinished, the talks in North Korea were going nowhere, the case for war in Iraq was based on conscious fraud and Bush had no exit plan for our troops in Iraq. Has anything changed? Yes, some members of the Bush Administration are apparently talking about a military bombing strike against Iraq.
George Packer, in his book, The Assassins' Gate, reminds us of the hyperbole that Bush aides use when describing the president:
One of Bush's advisers once explained to the journalist Ron Suskind the worldview of the White House. Whereas the nation-building experts and the war critics and Ron Suskind lived "in what we call the reality-based community" where people "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality," unfortunately "that's not the way the world really works anymore." The way the world now works amounted to a repudiation of reason, skeptical intelligience, the whole slate of liberal Enlightenment values. "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," the aide concluded, "and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." (pg. 390-391)
As Bush continues to 'create reality,' we in the reality-based community are indeed studying the growing mess that Bush is creating. If the town fool somehow becomes mayor, there comes a point when the town has to stop listening.
posted by Craig at 4:25 PM
1 Comments:
Clearly, the ones who needed to do a realistic accounting of Bush & Co. "accomplishments," honing to reality, were America's voters in 2004 — at least 3 million more of them.
The statements referred to in your post by an unknown Bush aide fit perfectly Karl Rove's M.O., although I'm sure they'd be equally likely to have come from Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz or any of a dozen others.
Those words echo sentiments expressed by Nazis like Himmler and Goebbels in the late 1930s and early 1940s, as in the heady period after France fell in a few short weeks.
Hitler himself was woefully ignorant about the U.S., about Roosevelt, and about the Soviet Union. He once claimed about his impending invasion of the U.S.S.R. that it was like a rotten old barn, that you just had to kick the door hard enough and the whole decrepit structure would come tumbling down.
It's incredible, how many people died because of that bit of ignorance. It's no less amazing how many around Hitler knew invading the U.S.S.R. was madness.
Like Bush, Hitler saw to it he was surrounded to the greatest extent possible by those who were, above all else, unfailingly loyal. Unfortunately, a higher percentage of Hitler's loyalists were not only competent but highly efficient at what they did, Herman Goering being a spectacular exception.
So far at least Bush doesn't have his detractors or those who fail the loyalty test hanged using piano wire. He and his pack of swivel-chair crusaders are nonetheless dangerous, and not just because of their ignorance and incompetence.
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