Ron Suskind on How Bush Leads The Country

Ron Suskind has a mindblowing article about Bush in the New York Times. That link is not the whole article and any analysis on Kos's site is going to be even more rabidly anti-Bush than we are, but you must read the second and third blockquotes where Suskind recounts getting put in his place by the White House. I'll repost them here if you're too lazy to click the link:

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.''

In case you missed it, that was a "senior advisor to Bush" insulting anybody who studies facts on the ground and legitimizing a do-what-we-want philosophy because they can get away with it. On Election Day, don't let them get away with it.

The next is another shocker, as a Bush senior media advisor says they count on Middle Americans to be mindless malleable sheep who are too busy with their lives to pay attention to the news, and insults anyone who wastes time paying attention to the way the country is being run:

And for those who don't get it? That was explained to me in late 2002 by Mark McKinnon, a longtime senior media adviser to Bush, who now runs his own consulting firm and helps the president. He started by challenging me. ''You think he's an idiot, don't you?'' I said, no, I didn't. ''No, you do, all of you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don't care. You see, you're outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don't read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it's good for us. Because you know what those folks don't like? They don't like you!'' In this instance, the final ''you,'' of course, meant the entire reality-based community.

Posted by Warrior Tang at October 16, 2004 10:03 AM

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