I Honestly Think This Is the Scariest Quote I've Ever Read

Courtesy of Josh Marshall at Talking Points:

"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.'

Ron Suskind, "Without a Doubt", New York Times Magazine

Somewhere Hegel is rolling in his grave.

Comments

[Tung Yin]

A somewhat less (but still) negative view of the same quote from Kevin Drum:

This doesn't strike me as an admission that Bush ignores reality, it strikes me as a boast that Bush is a man of action who changes the world around him while blue state elitists like Suskind and his fellow Times readers are fussily engaged in studying multiple sides of every issue. Bush is a doer, not an analyzer.

Who knows? Maybe it amounts to much the same thing, and the record of the past four years doesn't leave much doubt that Bush has little use for inconvenient data and patent disdain for anyone who fails to immediately see the things that seem so obvious to him — often with disastrous results. More interesting, though, is why Bush acts this way, and to understand that you have to read Suskind's piece pretty carefully.