James Kirchick Creates His Own Reality
Posted on May 8, 2008 by andrew
The liberal blogosphere certainly doesn’t need me to join in and help it defend itself from the likes of James Kirchick, but I just hate to see a blatant and obvious lie. No, I’m not talking about the real meat of the article, I’m talking about the somewhat tangential lede which was so obnoxiously false that it prompted me to not even bother reading the real meat of the article.
Open the pages of a liberal magazine or peruse the liberal blogosphere, and you’re bound to come across denunciations of the religious right, if not religion itself. The “reality-based community,” as self-satisfied liberal bloggers call themselves, was a term created in direct response to the “faith-based community,” what the Bush administration called recipients of money from its Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Given the religious right’s use of “faith” to justify hoaxes such as “intelligent design” and the ruinous attempt to convert homosexuals into heterosexuals, the left had good reason to criticize, and sometimes mock, the absurdities that are the inevitable result of religion mixing with politics.
[Emphasis added]
Maybe this wasn’t a willful distortion and Kirchick merely doesn’t bother to read articles addressing the current political climate appearing in respected national publications that have been cited countless times by other writers. Either way, it’s a fairly glaring error. I point you back to Ron Suskind in the October 17, 2004, New York Times Magazine:
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.”
[Emphasis again added]
Yes, we in the liberal blogosphere proudly declare ourselves to be a part of this “community”. However, it’s a name given by the Bush administration to anyone who believes in the value of rationality and empiricism. It has very little to do with the phrase “faith-based community”, and especially with religious faith itself, and everything to do with the fundamental dichotomy between the Bushies’ view of the world and our own.
But I suppose lies are always acceptable when used to attack liberal bloggers.
Sphere: Related Content» Filed Under James Kirchick, blogosphere, liberals
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