Here’s an interesting quotation from the New York Times:
This came to my attention on Livejournal, with the accompanying remark:
I thought you might be interested in discussing this.
I read that article even though I knew it was going to scare me, like going to see Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Like most good movies, it started out scary:
‘‘Just in the past few months,’’ Bartlett [Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush] said, ''I think a light has gone off for people who’ve spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he’s always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do . . . This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can’t be persuaded, that they’re extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he’s just like them. . . . ‘‘This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts,’’ Bartlett went on to say. ‘‘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.’’ Bartlett paused, then said, ''But you can’t run the world on faith."
I read that article yesterday with great interest.
I think you (and/or the LJ author) are missing/confusing the point: I think the “reality-based” vs. non-reality based comparison wasn’t comparing reality and faith, but rather was comparing being reactive with being proactive. I don’t mean to understate how scary some of the President’s alleged religious beliefs are (I do not want a President who thinks he’s the messia!), but I think the author of that article abused the “reality-based” phrase by using it in a different sense then the person whom he quoted ment. That bugged me as I was reading the article yesterday, I’m glad someone brought it up…
I think my roommate (and probably the LJ writer as well) are aware that the guy who’s being quoted isn’t opposing “faith-based” and “reality-based” – it just happens to be an appropriate irony.
This passage terrifies me, too. Normally I try not to get too involved in America’s politics, bt terrifies me just being in a country neighbouring a country whose current leadership along these lines. No one can pretend that America’s election isn’t going to affect the fate of a large number of countries.
Step by step, now:
A statement like this, written into a work of fiction, would be referred to as Bush-bashing and pro-Kerry propaganda. The aide has distanced himself from a “reality-based community” that “believes solutions emerge from your judicious study of reality” – his definition, not mine.
The aide here seems to be implying that his team – supporting George Walker Bush – either pays no attention to “discernible reality,” or at the last sees no reason to base “solutions” (ie, policy) on it.
The world doesn’t work like what? Presumably, he’s saying that observation, and basing policies on observation, is no longer done.
I can’t be the only one who thinks of that as a terrifying point of view.
He also dismisses the Enlightenment out of hand. This is interesting because America was pretty much founded by Enlightenment philosophers – Jefferson, Franklin, Henry were as much philosophers of the Enlightenment as Voltaire, Rousseau, and Thomas Paine.
The preamble of the Declaration of Independence is all Enlightenment philosophy. All of those things that are usually considered at the heart of American values – “free men” and “free markets” especially – are Enlightenment values.
For the Bush administration to break with those ideas means that it considers the experiment launched by Jefferson and Franklin to be a failure, and now America must move on to something else. The fact that this decision was made without open consultation with the American public shows the shape of the a future America the Bush administration has in mind.
Please note that this is being said by one of Bush’s aides. After all, all of us who now call America an empire are excoriated as America-haters.
There was always the risk, of course, that by modelling America on the Roman Republic, as its founders did, there would be the risk of a second Empire. It’s happening along the same lines as well – a manufactured war, the subjugation of other territories outside the republic, an elected leader converting himself into an autocrat while still maintaining the illusion of being a “man of the people.”
Even if America retains the vote within its own borders, it will still be a dictatorship. Making decisions unilaterally for the rest of the world, and acting on those decisions with brute force, means your government has declared itself government of the world, but only allowed 5% of the world’s population a vote. That’s an oliarchy at least.
This aide is rather sure of himself if he thinks he can get away with announcing America’s new imperial status. Empires are not good things, and I think most Americans know that. Empires are brutal, needlessly destructive things that inevitably implode when they over-expand.
The notion that one can create one’s own reality through a simple act of will is the philosophy of the psychotic. I also believe it was one of the governing philosophies of Oceania in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, a book that’s becoming disturbingly prophetic.
This dripping-with-arrogance passage pretty much sums up the worst of Western Civilization. The idea that the world is a blank page onto which the most powerful force can write is absurd. It hovers behind everty war and brutal colonial project of the last 200 years.
It’s also been proved an illusion over and over again. For some reason, the “blank page” never cooperates.
This quotation from Mark MacKinnon is just dripping with contempt – not for the voters of the other party, or for the undecided voters, but for the voters of his own party. He all but called them stupid – they’ll vote for us because they hate intelligent people.
If you have to celebrate the stupidity of your supporters, that doesn’t say much for your position. In different circumstances, this might make a dent in his support, but with America so polarized between two candidates – with opinion so solidifed – Bush and his advisors could probably do and say anything without making a dent in his support.
Sweet Vishnu above. It’s worse than we thought.
This is bar none the scariest single thing to come out of the Administration yet. And that’s really saying something.
Studying “reality” is a waste of time? Great Caesar’s ghost — so inconvenient facts can be ignored? “Faith-based,” indeed.
Our country is being run by crazy people. I wish I didn’t know this.
What is so amazing for me is to witness how much people seem to be surprized by this. Really… How come people outside the USA have more insight in the lunaticism of the present US president and administration then the citizens of the USA themselves?
You can’t be serious.
You find invading a sovereign nation and murdering thousands of its citizens with the support of a majority of the US population in clear contempt for the UN, vioalting of International Law and the Geneva conventions… not scary?
Do you people really think there was anything realistic involved in the attack and invasion of Iraq?
Wasn’t that obvious since the first Bush rant “War on Terror” and “you are with us or against us”, followed by all the rest you witnessed happening and still witness hapening?
I for one can only be glad that you finally seem to realize this. One less to go…
What about all the other millions in the USA?
I think we shall see that on election day.
Salaam. A
Well I for one have already called the invasion in Iraq “faith-based” in that Bush simply breieves that bringing democracy to Iraq will bring an end to terrorism and anti-US attitudes in the Muslim world.
And Bush’s economic policy is “faith-based” in that big tax cuts will always stimulate the economy enough to bring full emploment and reduce the deficit.
And Bush’s environmental policy is “faith-based” by virtue of being “denial-based” on the one hand, and “apocalypse-based” on the other.
[quote]
…Bush simply breieves…
[quote]
And he adopts a fake Chinese accent in doing so. :smack:
The relationship betwen Rush Limbaugh and ditto-heads that I find so enormously amusing.
You missed the faith based part where marching soldiers into Baghdad and pronouncing Iraq a democracy makes it a functional democracy. And the part where this democracy in Iraq initiaites the latest version of the domino effect and democratizes the entirety of the ME.
Don’t fucking patronize me.
I knew these guys were wrong, and always have been. Lots of people are wrong without being crazy. It’s safest to proffer the proverbial benefit of the doubt.
But when one of them actually comes out and says reality is irrelevant: that’s a totally new kettle of fish.
This is the way I’m reading it, too. It’s one thing to believe that the current Presidential Administration is cynically lying to us to curry favor and votes with the rah-rah jingoheads. It’s another to realize that the current Presidential Administration actually think they can believe the universe into being what they want it to be.
Ummm, so all of us complaining endlessly about Bush and his policies for the past four years; you’ve somehow managed not to notice this? The protests? The Daily Show?
Very good with the selective attention-paying yourself, there, toots.
That was a fascinating article.
Recall that the author was a former Senior journalist for the Wall Street Journal. Like a growing number of conservatives and otherwise calm analysts, he is concerned about a President who doesn’t mind being a lightweight and discourages tough-minded analysis. Indeed, awkward questions are seen as a sign of disloyalty.
As one of Bush’s major donors related:
Emphasis added.
I don’t think we should make too much of W’s supposed faith. We could just as easily characterize the President a fresh-minted MBA who lacks the real-world experience of actually running a company.* W is basically a talented frontman for whom confidence is everything and second-guessing a sign of weakness or worse.
- Qualifications available by request.
Many republicans gloss over this perceived shortcoming of Mr. Bush. From the O.P’s article:
I bet that didn’t upset anybody, especially in comparison to what was said about Mary Cheney. :rolleyes:
It’s not that that’s not scary; what’s scary is that there’s an additional element of…well, what I’d call insanity.
Which only applies if you’re willing to grant degrees of scariness…
Heil Bush :eek:
The thing is, the Bush folks are right.
::sound of single pin dropping 40 yards away::
Part right, anyway.
The United States is (like it or not, desire it or not) an empire, at least in the sense that we do weild the power of an empire.
Now, to me, that means we need to reject an older way of thinking, the wrong part that’s woven into the Bush folks’ thinking: conceptualizing the US as vulnerable, potentially if not immediately threatened and under attack from “enemies” against whom we must defend ourselves with whatever force is at our disposal.
Geez, c’mon. Three years ago, one ragtag terrorist group following one zealous fanatic managed against all odds to make very impressive candles out of two of our monument-sized skyscrapers. Feel free to list, month by month, the terrorist acts that have taken place in the US since then. Feel free to add them all up to a grand total at the bottom. Heck, feel free to include those that we don’t even think were precipitated by the same folks! The United States does not have an ongoing problem with terrorism. Israel has a problem with terrorism. Britain and Northern Ireland have, at certain points, had a problem with terrorism. What we’ve got is a history of a single fucking incident, jaw-droppingly disturbing though it was.
For us to be acting as if other nations and factions represent major, unilateral threats to us and our “way of life” is like a high school senior being poised to punch out any third graders who get too close to his back or his car, and hitting them as hard as he can when he does.
Having said that, I will now retract it. Because all metaphors and allegories only go so far. There is yet another factor. Nuclear weapons make it possible for some ragtag bunch of nutcases to wipe out entire cities. Even a little pipsqueak of a nuke like the Hiroshima bomb would wreak lots and lots of havoc in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Miami, etc.
But guess what? That doesn’t so much point up the need for empires to defend themselves against small nuke-weilding ragtag bunches of nutcases, because, as empires, there’s nothing the US or any future nation in a comparable situation can do about it. It points up, instead, the final end of the age of empires. Peace (Pax Americana or whatever) and security and any possibility of a useful form of global hegemony depends from now on not on being able to beat your opponents into bloody smears but rather on being able to offer them something they can buy into as participants.
If we’re going to spread democracy, we need to do it not by upending established governments via force but by turning the UN (or a more suitable replacement) into a truly democratic and representative world system with voluntary membership and the advantages it accords available to nations that provide democratic participatory rights to their own citizens. Discontinue the Security Council and set up either a Parliamentary or a US-Constitution-style system for making international decisions, and use our power (economic, military, and otherwise) to pump up that system and make it viable. We need to “Americanize” the world not just by giving them Big Macs and rock music. We need to give their nations an equal vote in exchange for those nations giving their citizenry an equal vote, and we need to be ready and willing to put American troops on the ground when the collective decision is that it’s necessary and appropriate to do so, without retaining a veto that we wouldn’t let the other countries use.
Over time, THAT’S how you rid the world of terrorism.
I’m having serious trouble with your post. Not that I necessarily disagree with it, but that it seems like a total non-sequitur.
The point isn’t the method of “ridding the world of terrorism” or whether the US is an “empire”. Fine - for this thread I’ll concede (almost) any point you want to claim about that. The point is that, according to the article, Bush sees himself as having a divine mandate that not only allows him to make decisions without critical thought, but insulates himself to the point that all critical analysis is impossible. Basically, that he’s delusional (I purposely chose that word as hyperbole to reflect the idea of not being based in reality).
Unless you’re a “true believer” and you support the idea of promoting armegeddon, this is defensible how?
All else aside, isn’t the point of Big Macs and rock music that they Americanize themselves and pay us for the privilege?
Nothing quite so amusing as the snotty Americanophobe who dresses like we do, watches our media compulsively and can’t shut up about our next election.
Catch more flies with honey than vinegar, etc.?
I guess we can ‘Americanize’ them with troops on the ground, but last time I checked, they pretty much volunteer. And what’s with giving them a vote? Vote in what? The UN is a mess already.
So the OKC bombing doesn’t count? The previous truck bomp at the WTC doesn’t count? The bombing during the Atlanta Olympics doesn’t count?