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<oembed><version>1.0</version><provider_name>naked capitalism</provider_name><provider_url>https://www.nakedcapitalism.com</provider_url><author_name>Lambert Strether</author_name><author_url>https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/author/lambert-strether</author_url><title>Wheels Falling Off the Imperial Reality-Creating Machine | naked capitalism</title><type>rich</type><width>600</width><height>338</height><html>&lt;blockquote class="wp-embedded-content" data-secret="iHnNwm5mYx"&gt;&lt;a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/08/wheels-falling-off-the-imperial-reality-creating-machine.html"&gt;Wheels Falling Off the Imperial Reality-Creating Machine&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;iframe sandbox="allow-scripts" security="restricted" src="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/08/wheels-falling-off-the-imperial-reality-creating-machine.html/embed#?secret=iHnNwm5mYx" width="600" height="338" title="&#x201C;Wheels Falling Off the Imperial Reality-Creating Machine&#x201D; &#x2014; naked capitalism" data-secret="iHnNwm5mYx" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no" class="wp-embedded-content"&gt;&lt;/iframe&gt;&lt;script type="text/javascript"&gt;
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</html><description>By Lambert Strether of Corrente. One of the most famous quotes from the era of Bush the Younger came from Ron Suskind in his (October) 2004 article, "Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush": 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, [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.''  Joseph Goebbels would be proud. No, Joseph Goebbels would be awed. And, back in 2004, what was, pre-Obama, regarded as the left blogosphere, bloggers rose en masse to claim the mantle "proud member of the reality-based community." We know how that worked out. But a little over a decade on, we can ask the question: Was Bush's "senior advisor" right? Do we, as imperialists, create our own reality? I'd argue that the current Syrian fiasco shows that the answer is No.</description></oembed>

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