Political correctness, GOP style
The most telling description of the Bush administration to date may have come from a White House aide who used the term “reality-based” as an insult. According to journalist Ron Suskind, who described the incident in a 2004 article, the aide mocked the stuffy, pedantic, presumably liberal view “that solutions (to political problems) emerge from … judicious study of discernible reality.”
“That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he added. “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.”
Well, history’s actors are suddenly hunting for a revised script. According to The Washington Post, with the president’s poll numbers sinking, White House “aides who never betrayed self-doubt now talk in private of failures selling the American people on the Iraq War, the president’s Social Security plan and his response to Hurricane Katrina.”
Funny, that’s not what they thought about Bush’s utopian scheme to democratize the Middle East. But hold that thought.
At the expense of sounding hopelessly old-fashioned, I’d suggest Bush has less of an image problem than a (dread word) reality problem. Nobody needs a cowboy when his house is under water. Nor will all the swaggering flight deck photo ops in the world balance the budget or extricate U.S. troops from an increasingly grim, chaotic mess in Iraq.
The Bush administration’s fundamental problem is that it has substituted ideology for practicality and loyalty for competence at every turn. It’s running the country like a business, all right. Unfortunately, that business is Enron, combining fantastical theories and astonishing greed. Because the Republicans also control both houses of Congress and have voted in lockstep on virtually every key issue, partisan dogma has taken precedence above all competing values.
The result has been mismanagement and incompetence on an heroic scale: ignoring the terrorist threat until Sept. 11 because Al Qaeda was a “Clinton issue,” driving the country into war in Iraq by conjuring imaginary nuclear “mushroom clouds,” forcing the retirement of military leaders (Gen. Eric Shinseki) who warned that pacifying Iraq would require hundreds of thousands more troops than neo-conservative theory dictated, getting rid of a Treasury Secretary (Paul O’Neill) who correctly predicted the war would cost tens of billions more than White House philosophers dreamed, rejecting detailed State Department plans for rebuilding Iraq in favor of pie-in-the-sky schemes to turn the fractured nation into a corporate utopia, turning a $300 billion budget surplus into a $550 billion (and counting) deficit through reckless tax cuts …
Such a list could go on almost indefinitely. Slashing FEMA’s budget, and replacing its experienced professional staff with hacks and cronies wasn’t a mistake; it was absolutely characteristic of the Bush administration’s vision of government as a partisan spoils system.
Even worse than its reliance upon abstract ideology has been the White House’s remarkable inability to admit error. Partly due to Republican-style political correctness, partly to the cult of personality surrounding President Bush himself — whose fabled “gut instincts” were supposed to make up for his manifest intellectual shortcomings — the administration finds it almost impossible to adjust to altered circumstances.
They’ve created their own reality all right. Alas, the rest of us have to live there, too.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons is a national magazine award winner. You can e-mail Lyons at [email protected].