During a speech in Alabama yesterday, President Bush made what has to be his most unintentionally ironic statement ever:
We are a nation at war. I wish I could report differently, but you need to have a President who sees the world the way it is, not the way somebody would hope it would be.
"[S]ees the world the way it is"? This is the president whose administration has dissembled about and ignored expert opinion on issues ranging from the evidence that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program to the economic effects of his tax cuts.
Indeed, a senior adviser to President Bush bragged to Ron Suskind in 2002 that the administration "create[s] our own reality":
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."
Maybe President Bush's statement is true in their reality! For the rest of us, the postmodern presidency continues...
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