Without a Doubt

Ron Suskind has an article in Sunday's New York Times magazine that contains one of the scariest passages I've read in a long time.

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.''

The article is entitled "Without a Doubt," and it deals with Bush's overwhelming confidence, lack of introspection, and "faith." In addition to the passage above, it presents the best description I've seen of what I will charitably call the decision-making process within the White House.

Though the complete disposal of empiricism is nothing that others haven't commented about (see my The Post-Modern Presidency), we were mainly speculating. Suskind claims to have actual observations, (though many sources are not specifically identified.) But one feature I hadn't counted on is that re-election will reinforce his preternatural confidence past its current near-messianic level. The first years of a second Bush term might be scarier than those of us in the reality-based community could possibly have imagined.