Blog For Arizona

Happy Halloween!

NYT Magazine is running a profile of Bush by Ron Suskind, author of The Price of Loyalty (registration required). There is a passage which is very good and sums up the article nicely. This section will coagulate your blood and freeze your marrow. You could seriously wear these paragraphs as a Halloween costume:

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.'

These people are totally gapped out on power. They don't even live on the same planet as the rest of us anymore. Wanna be afraid of something this November 2nd? Be afraid of this.

posted by Michael Bryan @ 10/16/2004 07:33:00 PM