La Deluge

If it hadn't already happened already [it had for me months ago--ed.], the publication of Ron Suskind's article in the weekend NYT magazine ripped to shreds the curtain separating the Bush administration's public presentation of itself and the internal mechanisms on which it actually operates. Suskind offers a mind boggling array of absolutely staggering quotations, from Bush administration officials, advisors, and other miscellaneous insidery types. It would be tough to determine which are the most damning. Here are my picks:

"Just in the past few months," [Bruce] Bartlett said, "I think a light has gone off for people who've spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he's always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do." Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush's governance, went on to say: "This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he's just like them. . . . [emphasis mine]"

As [Christie] Whitman told me on the day in May 2003 that she announced her resignation as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency: "In meetings, I'd ask if there were any facts to support our case. And for that, I was accused of disloyalty!" [Suskind notes that Whitman now disavows those remarks. Er, yeah.

[A]t the Bush administration's first National Security Council meeting, Bush asked if anyone had ever met Ariel Sharon. Some were uncertain if it was a joke. It wasn't: Bush launched into a riff about briefly meeting Sharon two years before, how he wouldn't "go by past reputations when it comes to Sharon. . . . I'm going to take him at face value," and how the United States should pull out of the Arab-Israeli conflict because "I don't see much we can do over there at this point." Colin Powell, for one, seemed startled. This would reverse 30 years of policy -- since the Nixon administration -- of American engagement. Such a move would unleash Sharon, Powell countered, and tear the delicate fabric of the Mideast in ways that might be irreparable. Bush brushed aside Powell's concerns impatiently. "Sometimes a show of force by one side can really clarify things."

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."

That last line reads like the harangues of O'Brien in 1984; it ought to be enough to creep out anybody with a pulse (or at least any member of the "reality-based community"). I'll have a lot more to say about this a bit later, but for now, here's a parallel line picked up on by Andrew Sullivan:

And I warned him about this war. I had deep misgivings about this war, deep misgivings. And I was trying to say, "Mr. President, you had better prepare the American people for casualties." [Pat] Robertson said the president then told him, "Oh, no, we're not going to have any casualties."

The messianic delusions are just too numerous and far-reaching to ignore. Can I place a bet on Tradesports that the president believes he's channeling a supersession of the New Testament?