McBush makes his own reality

Just like he's seen it done for eight years:

Journalist Ron Suskind relates a chilling conversation he had in 2002 with a senior aide to George W. Bush, who taunted Suskind for being a person from “what we call the reality-based community.”

The Bush aide said this “reality-based community” consists of people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” Suskind nodded in agreement and muttered something favorable about the principles of the Enlightenment, only to be cut off by the aide.

“That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” the Bush aide told the journalist. “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 study what we do.”

In many ways, that quote – cited in Suskind's New York Times Magazine article about Bush’s “faith-based presidency” – sums up the anti-rational arrogance that has become the hallmark of Bush’s inner circle, a group that apparently thinks that its actions transcend both law and reason.

For example, then:

CNN: Military Sources Respond To McCain's Escalation Remark With 'Laughter Down The Line'
Yesterday, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) told radio host Bill Bennett that President Bush's escalation is working. "There are neighborhoods in Baghdad where you and I could walk through those neighborhoods, today," he said. Today, when CNN's Wolf Blitzer asked McCain why Americans still aren't able to safely leave the Green Zone in Iraq, the senator replied that Blitzer was giving three-month-old talking points:

General Petraeus goes out there almost every day in an unarmed humvee. I think you oughta catch up. You are giving the old line of three months ago. I understand it. We certainly don't get it through the filter of some of the media.

But according to CNN reporter Michael Ware, who has been in Iraq for four years, McCain is "way off base." He stated, "To suggest that there's any neighborhood in this city where an American can walk freely is beyond ludicrous. I'd love Sen. McCain to tell me where that neighborhood is and he and I can go for a stroll."

Ware also rebutted McCain's assertion that Petaeus travels in an unarmed humvee: "[I]n the hour since Sen. McCain's said this, I've spoken to military sources and there was laughter down the line. I mean, certainly the general travels in a humvee. There's multiple humvees around it, heavily armed."

Remember when McCain went shopping in Iraq? assisted by 100 Soldiers, 3 Blackhawks, 2 Apache Gunships. And what happened some to of the Iraqi shopkeepers?:

And on April 2, the day after McCain's photo op in Baghdad, some of the merchants from the largely Shiite market he had visited were murdered. They had gone north looking for work when they were ambushed and killed by Sunni Arab guerrillas.

And now:

Surely McCain was seeing the "surge is working" glass eye he has fixed in his skull when he told a town hall crowd this week, "We're succeeding. I don't care what anybody says." And McCain backed up his claims with what he clearly considers his trump card: "I've seen the facts on the ground."

Well, he was just in Iraq for the eighth time since the war began, so he must know what he's talking about, right? Or was he merely seeing what he wanted to see, in order to become what he so desperately wants to be?

The most memorable example of McCain seeing what he wanted to see, of course, was his infamous stroll through Baghdad's central market last April, which he offered as proof of improved security. Remember the facts on the ground eyewitness account of his traveling companion, Rep. Mike Pence?

It was just like "a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime," reported Pence. Take away the 100 soldiers in armored Humvees and the three Blackhawk helicopters and two Apache gunships circling above and his comparison was spot on.