Revisiting a Key to Bush's Failures

There are many reasons why the Bush presidency is failing. Dan Froomkin of The Washington Post reminds us in his blog of Ron Suskind's famous New York Times Magazine article on reality and the Bush Administration:

His October 2004 piece in the New York Times Magazine added the term "reality-based" to the political lexicon.

It described a meeting in 2002 with a "senior adviser" to Bush: "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 an empire now.... When you hear words like that, you can only shake your head. With leaders like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, John Bolton, Karl Rove, Tom DeLay, Dennis Hastert, Bill Frist, Newt Gingrich and Richard Perle along with media supporters like Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, Charles Krauthammer, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, the radical conservative movement is dead. Who knows how much gas they have left in their tanks and how much further trouble they can cause 'creating other new realities,' but already they have damaged America. I'll have more on this later tonight.