This 11 page bush bash was in the NYT on Sunday. I've been avoiding memeing it for 24 hours. Its just too long. And its not news. But its absolutely everywhere. Every blog is discussing it. So I decided that some people up here might enjoy reading it. So here it is.

] 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 faith-based presidency is a with-us-or-against-us model that has been enormously effective at, among other things, keeping the workings and temperament of the Bush White House a kind of state secret. The dome of silence cracked a bit in the late winter and spring, with revelations from the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke and also, in my book, from the former Bush treasury secretary Paul O'Neill. When I quoted O'Neill saying that Bush was like ''a blind man in a room full of deaf people,'' this did not endear me to the White House. But my phone did begin to ring, with Democrats and Republicans calling with similar impressions and anecdotes about Bush's faith and certainty.

[ Read this. it's now almost a week old, but it's long and I don't like recommending things i haven't read thoroughly. It was worth it. Certainly, it's not news to anyone who's been paying attention, but it's ever so important to understanding the philosophy that has overtaken the power structure of the Right in America.

If nothing else, scroll to the end and read the last few grafs. The Bush presidency seems really to have been nothing less than an all out attack on the very notion of rational investigation, honest and open discourse and nuanced thought. He's peddled a black and white vision desired by so many who've consumed it in droves... but the world is seldom black and white, and it's escapist to live in that binary world. -k]