"When we act, we create our own reality." This says it all, explains

[Raven]

everything. This is a quote from a senior Bush advisor that appeared in Paul Krugman's recent essay. It was in response to a question about whether Bush had lost touch with reality. When you think about it, it really explains why everything has gone terribly wrong under the Bush administration. If you have this kind of an attitude or philosophy, you don't pay any attention to conditions around you, you don't need to listen to anyone else and you don't need to learn from your mistakes. You also don't need to obey laws or follow the rules because you can make up your own as you go along. The world is a blank canvass upon which you can paint whatever you want. And if it doesn't work out immediately, ultimately it will.

To me, this explains why Bush went into Iraq without a plan, without knowing the languages or the cultures. His "idea of reality" was instant oil and instant democracy. That it hasn't happened doesn't faze him because he has willed it so and so it will be...someday.

I'm sure DU'ers can think of dozens of other examples of this "we act, we creat our own reality" philosophy.

The hubris, arrogance, recklessness and sheer stupidity behind this quote and behind this philosophy makes me very, very afraid and gives credence, in my mind, to the concern that we won't see an election in 2008.

[Posteritatis]

1. If they can, we can. (nt)

[Dora]

2. I agree. n/t

[Mist]

3. Yes, and I'd bet OUR reality is positive and life based, rather than being based

on deceit, theft, terror, and eternal war.

[Amonester]

4. Instant oil was his (and their) plan for Iraq (and for Iran, next).

To hell with the "democracy" plan: that one never existed for real...

Hey, they even trashed "democracy" in the U.S. of A. to the point they've made it totally ineffective for stopping them to commit whatever crime of the day will allow them to get away with all their previous ones (cover-ups).

No, the only real plan is working since summer '03 (their instant oil plan they charge the taxpayers for enacting and for keeping it enacted).

The "other" instant plan has never been anything else than a convenient smoke-screen that's got them richer (an obscenly lot).

[rodeodance]

5. that qupte has bee circulating for a long time. It is part of the new neo-liberal thinking.

[Emit]

6. That quote came from an article by Ron Suskind, a must read, IMHO.

And, yes, it is a good example of right-wing authoritarian thinking.

October 17, 2004
Without a Doubt
By RON SUSKIND

~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://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/sloth/2004-10-16b.html

[wiggs]

7. Thank you for posting the whole thing. Important. This was our version of the

August PDB warning (one of many)....the press, pundits, opposition party should have read this with a cold shiver and done something immediately. Instead, like the Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the US briefing, this was essentially ignored.