Political Bloviation

This was an old article that I had never seen before. It has a definite illuminating effect. I read it and thought, “This is what’s wrong with the White House”. The certainty of a true-believer leaves no room for doubt, argument, questions, or has become painfully obvious, facts.

The New York Times > Magazine > In the Magazine: Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush
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.”

Doubt is useful, it leads to questions and perhaps a bit of curiosity. Without doubt there’s nothing at all intellectually that would prevent moving forward with an idea to it’s logical conclusion, no matter how wrong headed the underlying assumptions were. I claim my place as a proud member of the “reality-based community”.

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