An excerpt from a Ron Suskind, October 17, 2005, New York Times Magazine article:
“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.'”
Hubris defined. Arrogance to the nth degree. A statement that could have easily been uttered by any one of the powers heading the Roman Empire.
But in a sense. what was spoken above, WAS true.
In addition to occupying the presidency and exploiting its accompanying bully pulpit, the GOP ironfisted Congress. 9/11, the crowning segment of this perfect storm, cowed the vast majority of the nation’s media and just about every Democrat. George Tenet sold out his fellow CIA-ers. The Secret Service, known for dishing dirt on the previous White House inhabitants, were willing go-fers and do-ers for whatever was asked of them, including detaining anyone venturing even close to fitting an anti-Bush or anti-Cheney profile at public events. A number of newspaper columnists profited from being on the Bush Administration payroll. The antiquities fronting the mainstream media, especially in D.C. and New York, were simply unwilling to consider the vacuousness of the White House inhabitant and the mounting evidence of his sophistry and chicanery, simplistically and inaccurately labeling those raising concern as Bush-haters. If everything else failed, there was Karl Rove and his assorted brownshirts ready and waiting to unleash whatever was necessary to herd anyone back into compliancy and quietude (see Christie Whitman, John Diuilio and others, Alberto Fernandez most recently).
The Bush Administration created a separate reality–call it a bizarro world–but one that was lapped up by the uber-gullible but, more importantly and sadly, those who should have known better. Also, those whose profession it was to know better, prominent figures in the media, couldn’t bring themselves to such a sensibility. After all, how could one of their own gentility, one coming from a well-known and respected political hierarchy, be the President of the United States and yet superficial, cunning and mean-spirited. The most egregious of examples–the Bush Administration terrorizing the U.S. citizenry via the politicization of faux terror alerts. Such was incomprehensible to these elitists. To them, it simply couldn’t be–so it wasn’t.
But then came Katrina, followed by the inability to disguise the reality of Iraq. Strike one, then strike two.
Now the litany of books, Tyler Drumheller’s “On the Brink,” “Fiasco” by Tom Ricks, “Hubris” by David Corn and Michael Isikoff, “Cobra II” by Bernard Trainor and Michael Gordon, “Imperial Life in the Emerald City” by Rajiv Chandrasekaran and “State of Denial” by Bob Woodward have quantified and compounded, front and center, the indisputable evidence of fraud, incompetence, denial, vindicativeness, willful ignorance, misplaced priorities, hollowness and the personal incompatibility and inadequateness for holding the positions of greatest power in this country. Strike three.
The Bush Administration has struck out and yes, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot put the George Bush Experience back together again. Oz’s curtain has been shredded and the ugly, naked truth revealed. History’s so-called actors have lost their script and their created reality has been triumphed by the real thing–which they, of course, never saw coming. They were too busy conjuring up and then believing in their own fantasies and omnipotence to ever notice.
It happens to the best and, thankfully, to the worst.
