The Scariest Thing …

… that arrived in my inbox today was the following, from a former colleague and journalist who often irritates the hell out of me because of his indiscriminate email distribution of what I view as paranoid, hysterical conspiracy-mongering from the left. Sometimes I delete his messages without reading them. Today I opened the email and read this:

"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.’ "

–"Without a Doubt," by Ron Susskind (or Suskind, when you spell it correctly), NY Times Magazine 10/17/04

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html?pagewanted=1&oref=log
in

Pass it along…   Maybe people will wake up.

That’s the note. "Reality-based community." To indulge in what might sound paranoid and hysterical, it smells like something from people who think they’re building their own version of the Reich — enlightened, based on their interpretation of liberty and pursuit of all the best principles. And they’d love it if people just stood by and watched them do it.

One Reply to “The Scariest Thing …”

  1. Yeah Dan, I saw this guy on Charlie Rose. He was very good and not inclined to just trash the administration which, for me, gave him added credibility. At the end of the interview, Rose asked what he thought about the prospect of a second Bush administration…what did his gut tell him? Susskind said that his pit of the gut feeling was not a good one, that the Bushes wanted to do for the country what they had been doing in their approach to foriegn poicy. He seemed to think could be in for some dark times. Among these things, privatization of Social Security, three, maybe four Supreme Court appointees to name a couple. But the one I like is the story about Pat Robertson telling the president that maybe he ought to prepare the country for the prospect that there will be casualties in the, then upcoming, war in Iraq. Bush’s reply was that there “weren’t gong to be any casualties”.
    These guys is in the White House look at us “plebians” as an annoyance more akin to the vandals at the gate. Well, you know how I feel about people and their governments. If the citizens want to elect a messianic, Jim Jones type character to the highest ofice in the land, they deserve what they get. But for all the rest of us it’s like the old cliche about trying to step off a speeding train…..
    Good conversation the other PM. Hope you are well. JB

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