Explanation of "Reality-Based Community"

We on the blogs have now decided that we need a positive-sounding name that draws together all the anti-Bush people into one group. The name “Reality-Based Community” from Ron Suskind’s article (Excerpts below) strikes many of us as appropriate. Bush’s people are of course, “the other guys”.

The Faith-Based Presidency
By Ron Suskind

''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.'' 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.''

And for those who don't get it? That was explained to me in late 2002 by Mark McKinnon, a longtime senior media adviser to Bush, who now runs his own consulting firm and helps the president. He started by challenging me. ''You think he's an idiot, don't you?'' I said, no, I didn't. ''No, you do, all of you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don't care. You see, you're outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don't read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it's good for us. Because you know what those folks don't like? They don't like you!'' In this instance, the final ''you,'' of course, meant the entire reality-based community.

This is of course, by my own subjective lights, complete insanity. The French king, Louis XIV, also thought he was up above and beyond ordinary reality. I remember reading a passage where Louis was upset because his imported fish kept dying. He just couldn’t comprehend why these gosh-darn fish didn’t live when he, the great Louis, wanted them to live. Mme de Maintenon, his mistress, remarked that on the way back to the palace after a feast, the men would get out of the carriages and relieve themselves in the bushes. The women, of course, did not join them because why on Earth would modest and delicate females want to relieve themselves in the woods, where only rough men would want to do so? Besides, they didn’t have to go anyway.

Many of the women created health problems for themselves by holding it in for so long. Of course Louis would start wars without being terribly concerned about casualties or how well-equipped the troops were. Why, it was their imperial duty to fight for their king! Bush’s attitude appears to be a throwback to that earlier era.