The Reality-Based Community


The New York Times Magazine this past weekend featured an article by Ron Suskind about President Bush's faith. Not just Bush's religious faith. His faith in everything, his faith in himself, his faith in God, his faith in his "gut". His faith as policy.

"He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence", Bruce Bartlett, a Reagan advisor and former treasury official told Suskind.

Suskind continues pounding the theme in page after page, eventually defining Bush's antithesis through the words of a Bush aide speaking about Suskind's criticisms of the Bush Administration. Suskind writes:

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.''

There is the faith-based community and the reality-based community. In the reality-based community we have such odd bedfellows as Patrick Buchanan, John Kerry and Jim Wallis (a Sojourner minister who has met with Bush on several occasions). As Matthew Yglesias notes, we may have finally found the unifying theme for the "anti-Bush coalition". Reality.

Gene Healy has suggested that we start printing and wearing "Reality-Based Community" t-shirts. It may not be a bad idea.

This past week, as the Times reports, an entire platoon of American soldiers refused to follow an order they felt would send them on a "suicide mission". They were ordered to drive a convoy full of jet fuel from southern to northern Iraq. They refused, calling the mission non-sensical and too dangerous.

The fact that they are not yet being court-martialed, and that the military denies they are currently under arrest, is evidence that they may have been right. They disobeyed a direct order in time of war and may get out with simple dishonorable discharges.

Welcome to reality, President Bush. Here in Reality Country we believe in considering the consequences of our actions. Here in Reality Country we believe in reason and logic. Here in Reality Country we construct plans for going about complex tasks (you know, like invasions of sovereign countries). Here in Reality Country we allow the evidence to speak before we defer to our "gut".

http://www.warblogging.com/archives/000935.php

Posted: Wed - October 20, 2004 at 01:40 AM          

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