We're history's actors, all of you, will be left to just study what we do

[HamiltonHabs32]

I just dug this up and I was wondering what you guys thought of this snippet.

New York Times 17/10/04

<snip>
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.''
<snip>

http://www.williambowles.info/empire/bush_wars.html

[UL_Approved]

1. Seen it, understood it, disgusted by it

This is another link:

Without a Doubt By RON SUSKIND

I like the part about the "reality-based community". It really speaks to the full intentions of the Bush agenda.

[applegrove]

7. Scary Grandiose Words from 'some' 'high level' 'aide'.

[tanyev]

2. "We create our own reality"

I guess that's a nicer way of saying "delusional". Actual reality has a knack for always triumphing in the end, though.

[CoffeeCat]

3. The ramblings of a madman...

The most telling part of that quote was, "And while you're studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too..."

That's exactly what they're doing.

As the American people slowly realized that Iraq was a farce based on sick lies--the administration has been simultaneously planning their next adventure.

My guess is that Iran will not be the next target. I think that's a diversion. My guess is that Venezuela or another highly unanticipated country--will be next on the radar screen.

America knows too much about the Middle East now. For *'s tyranny to be effective--they need the Americans to fall into a steep learning curve--while move forward with their damage.

[Ready4Change]

6. Not a mad idea at all. They are making it work.

But THEIR madness becomes apparent when one considers what reality they are building with their actions.

[Donailin]

4. Isn't this from Ron Suskinds Article?

I have that saved on my pc simply because it's breathtaking. It is so telling, the collecive mindset of this group in power. I just finished, for the second time, Paul O'Neills book "Price of Loyalty" not so much for info on the policy apparatus of the WH (there simply is none, everything is run by the political arm ) but because of the psychology of Bush and his close advisors (Cheney, Rove, Hughes, Fliesher, Rice and a very small handful of others).

Bush has to be told what to think, and he is never given opposing POV's. Couple that with his arrested developement -- he is about as mature as the age before he became a bonafide alcoholic -- and what we have is . . . well, we all know what we have.

The good news: it won't , can't go on forever because as history shows us, evil always does itself in. always.

[deminks]

5. "We are an empire now."

A line that sets off so many alarm bells. It is why I knew the election was over (or never really going to happen. They were just going through the motions.) So telling, of the hubris, of the evil intent, of the schizophrenia of this administration. I wonder who the "senior adviser" was?? Could have been any of them.

[applegrove]

8. I know you I am betting on. And schizophrenia is not the illness.

Don't you get it? That person who said those words is coming from a place where he/she looks at all human being, and intellectuals and sees them as all being delusional. Neocons do that often when they talk about "assumptions". But this person is very, very special and important I must say at the outset! i've guessed at the name of the 'high level Bush aid' but I don't really know do I - I wasn't there.

Whoever it is that person sees the academics and the reporters as looking at the world through emotion. We all know that manic depressives and schizophrenics are delusional: allot of emotion blinds them to accepted realities. We also know that some delusions are acceptable (religious miracles) if enough people accept them. We admit ourselves to being delusional at the height of emotion (falling in love). It is well known in psychiatric fields that the depressed are the least 'delusional' of all - looking at only the bare bones of their lives (You are born, you live, you die - nobody loves me, I hate myself, why would anyone want to be friends with me?).

It seems that whatever gives us emotions give us a low or tiny bit of delusion (or a great bit). Delusion is reality as seen through the filter of emotion. Someone who looks at our 'hopes for peace in the world' or our shared 'goodness - based on human attachments and a little something called "love" that most of us experience' and sees delusion - well they may be gifted in the "reality department". And why not: the blind hear well, the dyslexic are good at body language, etc. We have each our own reality because we (if we are human beings) have our own emotional history and our own emotional 'story to tell'. And then we get together and share these stories across cultures: mostly stories of love of one kind or another. And that becomes our shared reality.

Considered a delusion only to someone who has no feelings whatsoever (even the depressed have feelings and episodic realities - though they see the earth layed bare and hopeless more often than happy people).

So who is this person who looks at the world and sees only the barest of things: human beings with stories to tell about their lives based on emotional things like 'histories' and 'personal politics'? And who is this person who knows that one 'reality' can so easily be replaced with another 'reality' (which would require changing people's emotions) very easily if you know how? Who is this person who looks at liberals (and their systems of beliefs) as liberals would look at some religious folk (with their systems of beliefs) - and with the same contempt for Liberals for not knowing the bare 'facts' and being so willing to believe in a 'loving world'?

And why when this person "brags" about their prowess at changing the base emotions of the population (changing the filer & instantaneously changing the 'reality') - why do they need the Greek Chorus in the background: that chorus of intellectuals who notice with awe the prowess of the speaker and feel great emotion (for him/her perhaps because him/her cannot feel any emotion themselves)?

My order of delusional goes like this (it is also the order of ‘emotionals’ by sheer coincidence):

Schizophrenics
Manic Depressives
Religiously Devout
Normal People in Love
Happy People
Depressed People
Neocons
Psychopaths


Just pondering ... my silly little Liberal world!

[teryang]

9. The supremacy of the will and the rejection of reason

Such an approach inherently rejects the rule of law and a system of government designed by architects from the age of reason.

This approach identified correctly in another thread as the "strategy of tension" was also the Nazi approach and is inherent in fascism.

The empirical processes of reason: fact questioning, public dialogue and reality based policy formulation, are inherently disabling to autocratic rule. The will is arbitrary in its dimension and of course is the natural recourse of an autocrat seeking to impose an aristocracy's rule by means of war, colonialism, intimidation and executive fiat.

[Jack Rabbit]

10. The epitome of arrogance

Artists and writers have the luxury of creating their own reality. Scientists and statemen do not. Reality -- emperical reality, a reality independent of the observer -- is the terrain in which even history's greatest actors move. They don't make it up -- they judiciously study it every bit as much as do intellectuals, a less ambitious group.

The neoconservatives are attempting to make up reality to suit their fantasies, not study a reality that is in fact independent of them. That is the epitome of arrogance. It is the hubris for which the Greeks believed that the gods punished mortals. That is why in the end, like the gods punihsed mortals who overreached, reality will defeat the neoconservative.

[glitch]

11. And even worse - their fantasies are so mediocre. Empire? Please.

Like that's never been done before. And they think they're inventing it.