Must Read: Mark Crispin Miller "Reality Always Wins"

[TruthIsAll]

http://www.alternet.org/election04/20360/

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community."... 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.'
– Ron Suskind talking to senior Bush advisor, The New York Times Magazine

If there's a fair election on Tuesday, the Democrats will win it by a country mile. On the other hand, if Bush/Cheney manage to subvert the race again, their dominion will go on and on. The right intends to rule not just for "four more years," but for as long as it will take the rest of America to drive them out. At this great fight we will prevail, eventually, because Bush/Cheney's project is impossible. They can't reverse the course of history. They cannot contradict reality. The world is what it is, however vehement their prayers. It doesn't matter how much slack the American press will keep on cutting them, or how insistently their pre-selected audiences keep cheering at them, or how "resolved" Bush keeps on saying he is. All their brutal steps and brilliant fakery will only lead them to the same gigantic bone yard where so many other glorious crusades have ended up.

Bush/Cheney have to lose, as all such crackpot movements must. In fact, it wouldn't be inaccurate to call them losers – as that is clearly how, deep down, they see themselves, for all their would-be macho swagger. Here they are, completely dominant in all three branches of the federal government, triumphant in state legislatures coast to coast, and over-represented all throughout the corporate media; and yet they always sound like livid also-rans, compulsively attacking those whom they've already beaten. Sitting through their last convention, with its incessant nastiness and choral jeering, you would never know that the Republicans had been declared the winners of the previous election. Like Nixon, they cannot help but play the rabid underdog, always right yet somehow always wronged.

more...

[Inland]

1. Reality wins, of course: but does the right candidate?

Sometimes reality winning means the lying leader takes the country right down the hole. Reality winning in the cold war meant the end of the USSR. Reality winning in WWII meant the destruction of the countries Hitler and Tojo commanded.

Anyone hear from the Confederacy lately?

Reality wins, but will the lying faith based president lead us to the losing side? No, we must elect a person who can see it and will acknowledge it before it is too late.

[bloom]

2. he makes some good points

I've been thinking how - if the Democrats were being as immoral about the whole voting process as the Republicans - I would be done with all of them....

Have Bush/Cheney sped so far ahead of us because theirs is the only way to win? If so, we might as well give up. If we should ever try to see things as Bush/Cheney does, that effort to be like them would destroy us just as surely as their victory itself would do us in. Far from imitating them, this approach to governance must be opposed in its totality. We must answer every falsehood with the truth, and do so with the necessary moral force of righteous indignation. And this cathartic process must begin with a frank definition of the danger that the people face. We in "the reality-based community" believe whole-heartedly in this community, and fully honor that reality; and that reality today includes the threat of Christo-fascism. That movement is opposed to everything that this republic stands for: free thought, free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, popular self-government, the right to vote, equality before the law and the pursuit of happiness.

[enough]

3. Great analysis

snip>

When governments go mad, not many eminent observers will allow themselves even to see it, much less comment on it. Rather than shout out the awful truth – i.e., that the emperor is not just naked, but insane – those with large investments in the status quo would much prefer to hold that there's a method to the madness, that the man on top is crazy like a fox ("Come on, he's only saying that, to please his base!"), or that he's just a figurehead, with wiser others close at hand to keep him an eye on him. To claim otherwise would be alarmist and naive, while those professionals in the know know better than to think that what has obviously happened here has obviously happened here. Thus the pundit comes across as a more reasonable person than those scary few who tell the truth out loud; and yet that soothing view is founded less on any rational analysis than on the pundit's sense of his own rationality, which he projects, complacently, onto the zealots at the top.

snip>

In the face of so perverse a movement, what can any reasonable person say? While argument against it is essential, arguing with it is impossible, as it does not share with us any premises of rational exchange. To all points of dissent, it says, "Who cares what you think?" To all contrary evidence, it says, "I believe what I believe is right." And to the offer that we might at least agree to disagree, it says: "Go fuck yourself." Rage is finally all there is to it; and so there is more to do than just rage back at it, as that alone will only keep them going and ourselves stuck in an endless shouting match, in which we're always made to sound defensive, although in the right.

snip>

In defense of these essential rights, Bush/Cheney and their followers must be thwarted and contained. This fight cannot be won by arguing with them, because they won't engage in argument, or even tolerate it. Nor can it be won by merely raging at them, as such anger only serves to make them madder. The way to victory is to stand up and say no to them, and tell them that the rest of us stand proudly for the visionary line of our forefathers. Like Jefferson and Madison, we know that this world can and must be bettered for the sake of all who live here now, and all who will live after us. Such optimism is the very spirit of America, however painfully we are divided at this moment.