the fascists are coming! the fascists are coming!

Bush's retreat from reality, as discussed in Salon's War Room, is getting ever harder to stomach.

In "Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush," Ron Suskind's New York Times Magazine cover story, he quotes a senior Bush advisor who derides him, along with most journalists, experts and government technocrats, as part of the "reality-based community." As Suskind tells it, the advisor described this group as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernable reality," an approach this administration evidently sneers at.

"I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principals and empiricism," Suskind writes. "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.'"

As Salon put it, "It's considered unfashionably shrill to refer to the Bush administration as fascistic, but this is pretty clearly the language of totalitarianism. "

They also quote Hannah Arendt's seminal 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, where she wrote, "Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it."


and now, a little good news:

Along with several others, the Florida newspaper Bradenton Herald has reversed its position of four years ago and now endorses Kerry, with this editorial:

"When the Herald recommended the election of George W. Bush as president of the United States four years ago, we lauded his record in Texas as a consensus builder and expressed confidence in his ability to unite the country after four years of bitter partisanship. We liked his slogan, 'A uniter, not a divider,' and criticized opponent Al Gore's role as point man for Democrats' mean-spiritedness. How poorly we understood George W. Bush in 2000. We could not imagine the possibility that, just four years later, Bush would have done just what we feared of Gore - that the United States would barely be on speaking terms with some of its staunchest allies, and that America would be reviled around the world as a bullying, imperialist superpower." ...read the rest...