All that you need to know

From LaShawn Barber (who won't merit a link from this blog):

Let me clear up one thing. Whether Americans flushed the Koran down the toilet is irrelevant. Newsweek should not have reported it, even if true.

That is the Right Wing take on the media: You report what we want you to report, otherwise we'll send out the attack dogs, who'll say in blog after blog and on show after show that you hate America.  The facts? Those are irrelevant.

I know it is tough for those of us in the Reality-based Community to understand, but this is what we are dealing with.

Comments

[jo-fo]

Of course. If any real news gets out, how are the Republican leaders going to keep their beloved constituents in their camp? If the real news about all the atrocities were to be fully revealed, they might have to take a second look at where they really stand. And that could be very frightening - to realize you've been supporting the wrong people all along. It's despicable how the Right tries to sanitize our media by keeping the real stories out of the public eye.

[aldahlia]

And, it's gonna get worse, before it gets better.

I'm about ready for this decade to be over.

[Dylan]

"I'm about ready for this decade to be over."

Genius.

[Andrew]

"The reality-based community," huh?

Nothing like being part of a self-selecting elite...

[Dylan]

(Below is an email I sent to Andrew)

Andrew,

The phrase "reality-based community" is in reference to an article that came out around election time in which a member of the Bush Administration (who was quoted anonymously, but has been suspected to be Donald Rumsfeld, a claim which hasn't been disproven yet) said something to the effect of "Liberals are members of a reality-based community, where as we create our own realities and liberals report on the realities we create."

Agree or disagree with the sentiment, it caused waves back then, and that phrase is widely used among liberal bloggers. I'm proud to be part of the real reality and not merely the reality of one's choosing. Using that phrase is intended to harken back to that phrasing by the Bush Administration, and not to place myself into some self-appointed elite. Despite what Republican spinsters will try to shove down your throat, the vast, vast majority of liberal Democrats are neither wealthy or elite.

Thanks for reading.

[Andrew Watkins]

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.''
Ron Suskind -- NYT Magazine
October 17, 2004

As opposed to an elite that sees no problem with the overthrow of rationality? No one in the reality-based community selected themselves. They were labeled, labeled by people who view a "judicious study of discernible reality" as a negative. Or maybe just irrelevant.

Regardless of politics, I'm a proud member of the reality-based community; I don't see any alternative. Problem-solving of an illogical nature?

[Dylan]

Thanks for finding that quote for me, Andrew... I was having trouble tracking it down.