1115.org

In the heat of last year’s Presidential campaign, Ron Suskind wrote about a conversation between himself and an unnamed (my guess: Dan Bartlett) advisor to the President:

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.”

At the time the piece ran, the race between the President and John Kerry was within the margin of error, and Suskind’s revelation reverberated across both sides of the political divide. Supporters of the President marveled at their side’s ability to define nearly every issue in a fact-free vacuum, and Kerry backers festooned their blogs and bumpers with messages that read “Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community.” The left believed the quote would wake up just enough voters in the squishy middle, while the right hoped that their manufactured universe would maintain orbit long enough to win them four more years.

Though it’s still possible to create my own reality for about five seconds as the alarm goes off each morning, “history’s actors” provided George W. Bush another term and more opportunities to invent facts and brush aside empiricism. The onslaught began the morning after the election when the President spoke of his newly-minted political capital as his supporters touted a 3% margin of victory as a mandate. And since, we have witnessed a sort of national cognitive dissonance where killing Social Security made more sense than making the small changes needed to fix it. Where the President could stand next to a file cabinet for a photo-op and claim that the $1.7 trillion in bonds it contains are worthless without causing a financial panic. Additionally, the President and leading Republicans suggested that modified creationism should be taught alongside evolution in schools, attempted to convince the country that there was no higher priority than passing boutique legislation for a brain-dead woman, and continue to describe the perpetual body count in Iraq as the “last throes” of the enemy.

Viewed through the lens of this artificial reality, it would be easy to dismiss Tom DeLay’s latest bit of revisionism as more of the same were it not so easy to debunk:

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said yesterday that Republicans have done so well in cutting spending that he declared an “ongoing victory,” and said there is simply no fat left to cut in the federal budget.

This claim isn’t new, in fact the President lied about it in the second debate last October, but even right wing think tanks aren’t buying:

There is so much fat in government spending—from $300 million bridges to islands with 50 residents in Alaska to billions of dollars in overpayments by federal departments—that it is hard to know where to begin.

The libertarian Cato Institute addressed Republicans profligate spending earlier this year:

Even after excluding spending on defense and homeland security, Bush is still the biggest-spending president in 30 years.
[…]
Total government spending grew by 33 percent during Bush’s first term.
[…]
Under Bush, Congress passed budgets that spent a total of $91 billion more than the President requested for domestic programs. Bush signed every one of those bills during his first term.
[…]
Republicans could reform the budget rules that stack the deck in favor of more spending. Unfortunately, senior House Republicans are fighting the changes. The GOP establishment in Washington today has become a defender of big government.

And when put in the perspective of recent history, the spending that was mostly flat during Bill Clinton’s Presidency has exploded.

There is not a Republican in office today who has not campaigned on fiscal responsibility, yet at every turn they cut taxes and authorize wasteful spending that pushes sanity further into the future. And now that Katrina has destabilized their carefully crafted menagerie of smoke, mirrors and yellow ribbons in ways that even war in Iraq could not, they want to borrow and spend up to $200 billion to rebuild the Gulf coast and the damage done to the President’s standing. With that money comes a test: every dollar spent serves to bolster liberal ideals which hold that the government must collect enough in taxes to prepare for such emergencies.

At this rate, DeLay, the President and all of their allies are going to have to work much harder at “creating new realities.” Mother nature and the bond market seem to align themselves with the reality-based community.

And of course “our way works better.“