Creating Reality

I was reading some of my daily sites today, and came across this article from the New York Times; It was written on October 17, 2004. The article has many scary implications. Right from the opening, Reagan's domestic policy advisor warns us about the implications of re-electing Bush: "Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me recently that ''if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.'' The nature of that conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion. "Just in the past few months,'' Bartlett 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.'' Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush's governance, went on to say: "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." Or can you? Bush has been elected twice to the presidency due, in large part, to the religious right. This evangelical group - the core of the energetic "base" that ushered Bush to victory - believes that their leader is a messenger from God. Since 2001, this leader has systematically and overtly attacked a series of sovereign nations without evidence. As he answered Senator Biden's question, "How can you be so sure when you know you don't know the facts?", Biden said that Bush stood up and put his hand on the senator's shoulder... "My instincts," he said, "My instincts." Absolute faith does indeed overwhelm the need for analysis. The President's instincts and his so-called faith allow him to do a myriad of things. One of these things, apparently, is that he is allowed to create his own reality. Seriously, I'm not making this up. The worst quote in the entire article is from a "top aide" to Bush. The quote: "...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." We're an empire, and we create our own reality?? When did that happen? So, we have a president that runs the world based on faith, and his empire is engaged in creating its own reality. Right from the horse's mouth.