The Reality Based Community
Thursday, January 16, 2014
Back during the Bush administration, Ron Suskind reported a conversation with an unnamed Bush aide who purportedly described Suskind as part of the reality based community, as opposed to the Bush people who were creating their own reality. The line was picked up and extensively repeated by people hostile to Bush and delighted to identify themselves as part of the reality based community, in contrast to him and his supporters.
It occurred to me at the time that there was a small problem with their position. The only evidence for the quote was the report by Suskind, obviously a hostile source, and he did not even identify the person he claimed to be quoting, making it impossible to check his story. Those who took his account as gospel demonstrated, by doing so, that their beliefs were based on what they wanted to believe, not on what they had good reason to believe.
Or, in other words, that they were not part of the reality based community.
Someone recently pointed me at a piece by Jacob Weisberg, editor-in-chief of the Slate group and author of a book on the Bush administration, that supports my suspicion. By his account, based mostly on what Suskind wrote more recently about the Obama administration: at this point, Suskind should no longer be treated as a "controversial" journalist as much as a disreputable one. His fellow journalists no longer trust him. Readers shouldn't either.. P.S. On the subject of whether or not the left half of the U.S. political spectrum is the reality based community, I cannot resist one piece of evidence I recently came across:"What we do know is the temperature around the globe is increasing faster than was predicted even 10 years ago." (Obama in 2012 press conference) The actual data, courtesy of the NOAA
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