The aide (a senior advisor to President Bush) 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 discernable reality”…”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…” — as reported by Ron Suskind, in the New York Times Magazine, 10-17-2004
That rare burst of on-the-record candor from our “senior advisor,” uttered just before the last national election, is present in every increasingly desperate tactic Republicans and the Bush administration are employing in the weeks and days leading up to Tuesday’s election. From fear-mongering, appallingly dishonest and sleazy campaign ads, and baiting of gays and immigrants, to the latest headlines, each of these tactics represents a Rovian attempt to create, in a staggeringly hostile political climate, the reality of a plurality of votes in a majority of congressional jurisdictions being counted for Republican candidates on November 7.
Bush’s Republicans are trying, in other words, to create the only reality that has ever truly mattered to these people: their ability to seize and maintain power. In 2002 and 2004, they succeeded. But with every gambit and at every turn this electoral season, they are failing.
Reality bats last. The Republican Congress will have its head handed to it next Tuesday: a 30-40 seat loss in the House, and quite possibly a Democratic majority in the Senate as well — an outcome no sane observer would have predicted six months ago.
There is one, and only one, reason for the political tsunami now approaching the shore: the accumulated weight of countless instances of lies, corruption, and failure from the Bush administration and a sycophantic Republican Congress. In every congressional race in the country, voters are before everything else holding a referendum on a failed presidency and a Congress grown corrupt and lazy with its place at the trough. Before the power of this gathering tsunami, as we watch the first waters receding from the beach, the Bush administration is this week still feverishly trying whatever it can to create a different reality.
On Sunday and Monday, the U.S. held a large-scale, two-day naval exercise in the Persian Gulf, just off the coast of Iran, using its newly arrived war ships to test surveillance and warmaking capabilities and to, just perhaps, entice Iran into a premature attack the week before elections. Iran demurred, opting instead for its own hastily announced naval exercises later in the week.
Then, in predawn hours on Monday, in a story studiously ignored in most U.S. media, a U.S. predator drone fired three missiles on an Islamic school in the village of Baijur in northwestern Pakistan, killing 80 civilians, mostly students. Only three badly injured students survived in the completely destroyed residential school. According to Pakistan’s Daily Jang:
“The bodies were burnt. Pieces of flesh were strewn all over the place. Rescuers were picking up body parts and putting them in bags and Chaddars,” said Mushtaq Yousafzai, a reporter for The News, who had spent the night in Bajaur in anticipation of the peace accord that was scheduled to be signed on Monday and was among the first to reach the site of the attack…. Villagers said most of the dead were students aged 15 to 25 years.
That peace accord was to be signed between the Pakistani government of dictator Pervez Musharraf and Taliban-aligned tribes along the Afghanistan border. The location and timing of the strike, coming also during a tour by Britain’s Prince Charles for interfaith reconciliation and thus also enraging the British government, suggests it was neither a Pakistani nor a NATO but a U.S. operation.
At minimum, the U.S. missile strike put an end to any immediate hopes of cooperation between Musharraf’s government and its Islamic and tribal opponents, who have been fiercely critical of Musharraf’s cooperation with the U.S. “Global War on Terror.” But that, in itself, wouldn’t necessarily be worth the risk of so enraging Pakistanis that Musharraf’s government itself would be in danger of toppling, leaving (among other things) Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal in Islamist hands. (As it was, there were widespread protests across Pakistan on Tuesday.) That, in turn, lends credence to reports by ABC News and others that the goal of the missile strike was to kill Al-Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al Zawahiri.
Zawahiri has been talked up much more in recent weeks by the Bush administration as a high profile target, and military intelligence, according to Pakistani sources, indicated he had been staying at the school. Would the Bush team be so crass and cynical as to talk up a target once they had him located, and then wait until the week before a tight election to assassinate him so they could get a favorable electoral bounce back home?
Let’s hope not, because if so -– shades of Tora Bora -– they blew it. Zawahiri wasn’t in the school’s rubble. Only 80 murdered students and teachers, surrounded by tens of millions of pissed-off Pakistanis who are fully aware their innocent countrymen died to benefit one party in a legislative election half a world away.
Nice job.
Fortunately, by the time the full story of that misadventure could ooze out in the U.S., a manufactured contretemps emerged to replace it. This was the wholly fictional umbrage of the White House over remarks by Sen. John Kerry that clearly –- even after Kerry strayed from his prepared remarks (which both media and the White House possessed copies of) — insulted the intelligence of George Bush. (Is it an insult if it’s true?)
Instead of defending Dubya’s intelligence (a far more problematic task than bald-faced lying), Republican apologists rose on cue to echo the White House’s outrage, absolute outrage, that Kerry had insulted the troops in Iraq. Follow along: Kerry told a college audience in Southern California that he’d been in Texas the day before, that President Bush used to live in that state, but that now Bush lives in the state of denial. Kerry then added that Texas had thus reminded him about the value of education: “if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you can get stuck in Iraq.”
Even as ad-libbed above, that’s pretty unmistakable, especially with the Texas reference somehow omitted in most media accounts. It’s unmistakable, that is, unless you’re desperate to manufacture a faux (or “Fox”) controversy, even better one involving the ol’ Frenchish flip-flopper, and thus get another embarrassing foreign policy and military fiasco out of the domestic news cycle.
In a couple more days, the Kerry episode will be forgotten here, another failed attempt to influence an election. In Pakistan, people will remember, and our troops, and our nation, will be that much less secure. That is insulting the troops.
Want more? Sure you do. On Sunday, the U.S.-controlled kangaroo tribunal trying Saddam Hussein and several top lieutenants is scheduled to announce verdicts and sentences. This will assuredly include death for Saddam, a purely coincidental (sic) bit of timing Rove et al doubtless will scramble to exploit as some sort of great anti-terror and humanitarian triumph for Bushco. In so trumpeting, they’re not likely to include the tidbit that Hussein, at the time of the crimes he was tried for, was being befriended and armed by the Reagan administration and its Special Middle East Envoy, a chap named Donald Rumsfeld. But I digress.
The problem with this strategy is that after a steady three-year accumulation of daily bad news, it’s impossible to mention anything about Iraq in any news report without conjuring up among most Americans the icky feeling that comes with knowing what a consistent, unmitigated catastrophe Bush’s Iraq has been ever since Saddam’s ouster. It’s even ickier when you realize that according to Lancet, Dubya is now responsible for over twice as many Iraqi deaths as Saddam, and according to the United Nations, the rate of torture is now greater in Iraq than it was under Saddam.
Most Americans don’t know those latter fun facts. But most Muslims do. Bush has accomplished the nearly impossible feat of making Saddam Hussein into a sympathetic, indigenous hero in the Middle East. And now, he’s about to make him into a martyr. Even better. Another failure. And, as with the Pakistani bombing, another reminder that any anti-terror war by definition must be a war for hearts and minds more than a war for conquest. Bush is doing even worse on the hearts and minds front than he is on the conquest front –- where, as national treasure Molly Ivins has written, he is about to go down in history as the first American president to lose two wars simultaneously.
Both of which Bush initiated. And if he also attacks Iran, he can make it three for three.
None of this futile election-related maneuvering is going to make a damned bit of difference come Tuesday, for the elegantly simple reason that Americans have seen variations on all of it before, and we’ve for certain seen all the failure before. There are simply too many of us in too many parts of the country that are sick of it. And sick of what it has done to our country.
This active nausea (mixed in many quarters with pure rage) is so widespread that no well-oiled microtargetting or Get Out the Vote efforts, no new Voter ID laws or voter suppression or fake automated call campaigns, no electronic touch screen hacking or secret Diebold programming, and no last-minute headlines will deny the collective American verdict on the current Republican Congress, and, by extension, the Bush administration and the last six years of corrupt, inept, illegal, odious one-party rule.
That verdict will be a product of our Bush advisor’s much-mocked “reality-based community.” Reality, indeed, bats last. It will be even less surprising than Saddam’s rigged fate. The verdict will be unequivocal. It will be very simple:
Get out.
