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Saturday, January 22, 2005

Nooners Ponders The Imponderable

Peggy Noonan, possibly the only columnist besides David Brooks who requires kneepads to ply the trade, weighs in, sort of.

The administration's approach to history is at odds with what has been described by a communications adviser to the president as the "reality-based community." A dumb phrase, but not a dumb thought: He meant that the administration sees history as dynamic and changeable, not static and impervious to redirection or improvement. That is the Bush administration way, and it happens to be realistic: History is dynamic and changeable. On the other hand, some things are constant, such as human imperfection, injustice, misery and bad government.


Nooners is half-right, but disingenuous even on that half. Here's the area of the Suskind article whence came the "reality-based" phrase:

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.''

Who besides guys like me are part of the reality-based community? Many of the other elected officials in Washington, it would seem. A group of Democratic and Republican members of Congress were called in to discuss Iraq sometime before the October 2002 vote authorizing Bush to move forward. A Republican senator recently told Time Magazine that the president walked in and said: ''Look, I want your vote. I'm not going to debate it with you.'' When one of the senators began to ask a question, Bush snapped, ''Look, I'm not going to debate it with you.''


So it's not an intuition that "history is dynamic and changeable", so much as the obvious knowledge that we are, for better or worse, the prime movers in the world. We cough, the rest of the world catches the cold. As such, we make shit happen. This is a wonderful power to have, except that right now, this impossibly grand power is in the hands of people who not only have drunk the Kool-Aid, they've whipped up more batches and won't take no for an answer at this frat-party keg-dive. Drink, motherfucker, drink!

It is no longer about "right" and "wrong", "good" and "evil". It's about "can", and "do" and "will". There is no "try".

It would be a happy fantasy that one, just one, self-respecting Senator of either party would react to being addressed in such a childish manner (''Look, I want your vote. I'm not going to debate it with you.'') thusly: "Fine. You don't get my vote until we discuss the issue at hand. Period.".

Once again, no one has to take this guy's shit, and I'll be damned if I can figure out why anybody does. Better to die on your feet than live on your knees. Do any of these lackeys understand this?

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