How "reality" is created in 21st century America…
The aide said that guys like me (author, Ron Susskind) 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."
"We create our own reality."
And, sadly, the Bushies did create their own reality.
The disturbing part of our national Bush hangover is the fact that, after a Democratic landslide last November, reality is still being created by conservatives and their media stenographers.
Here's why I say that…..
As The Reverend predicted would happen, incriminating evidence that the Bush administration committed crimes has been coming out of every previously tight-clenched jaw since last November. The torture memos, ordered by Bush, and written, criminally, by stooges pleasing their masters or looking to get a future judgeship…..were released by President Obama. The memos negated the lie that torture was only done by a "few bad apples." Torture, the memos demonstrated, originated, and were structured and ordered from the very top.
However, conservatives with their corporate stenographers in tow, quickly "created" a new reality about torture being ordered from the top of the Bush administration.
Nancy Pelosi knew about torture.
That became the new "reality". The "discernable reality", naturally, was that Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Gonzalez/Bybee/Yoo/Bradbury/Rice were, in fact, war criminals for establishing a torture regime strictly prohibited by multiple U.S laws and treaties…and the memos were the proof. But instead, page after page of print media and hours of teevee news chatter were set aside to tell the faux-"reality" story that the Speaker of the House had been briefed about Bush/Cheney torture.
Rather than the spotlight of inquiry being focused on the true story….Bush/Cheney established an unlawful American torture regime worthy of prosecution…..the spotlight was placed on Nancy Pelosi. Every news outlet of the corporate kind rushed to "report" on this newly created reality. As this new "created reality" spun and spun, eventually, it landed on…"Pelosi said the CIA misled Congress."
As more and more first-hand evidence about torture came out, like that from Ali Soufan, an FBI interrogator who interrogated Abu Zubaida before he was ordered by the White House to be tortured….and Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell at State, stating that Bush/Cheney ordered torture to gain false-confession links of Al-Qaeda with Iraq.….."discernable reality" pointed to an executive level criminal conspiracy.
The unavoidable conclusions from the testimony by Soufan, Wilkerson and many others was that Bush/Cheney not only set up an illegal torture regime in secrecy….but that a part of the rationale for the torture was to extract knowingly bogus intelligence connecting Iraq and Al-Qaida, bogus intelligence that was then later used to mislead Congress and the American people about the "threat" of Iraq.
In other words….the "discernable reality" evidence pointed to a conspiratorial and dastardly crime of treason by Bush/Cheney. The "created reality" dominating the corporate media news? Nancy Pelosi should be investigated.
When Bob Graham, Jay Rockefeller and even the CIA couldn't say for sure what Pelosi knew or didn't know…..a brand new "created reality" emerged…
Torture works. Torture saved lives.
The Dick, and The Dick's offspring daughter, demanded the media spotlight as they sought to "create" more "reality". Corporate media was more than willing to give face and air time to The Dick family members in their reality creation quest. Both Cheney's repeatedly asserted that torture saved lives and broke up terrible "second wave" plots against America. If only that America-weakening Obama would release all the intelligence memos, The Dick family members said, then, it would be proven that Bush/Cheney's illegal and secret torture regime had saved "thousands" of American lives, perhaps, "tens of thousands."
Now, Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) has stood up for "discernable reality".
Watch the first three minutes of the following video…..
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The Dick family members are lying….again….but the corporate media has already reported so much on the lying version from the Dick family that the gullible audience can't "discern" any longer what 'reality" is. Job well done.
And so it goes. Closing Guantanomo because it makes America less safe, an ongoing black eye to America's standing in the world, was turned on it's head by dishonest conservatives and their media lapdogs "creating reality",….."Scary terrorists will be released into the United States."
Blurring and confusing the small portion of "discernable reality" that appears in the media cycle is what this is all about. Every day that corrupt conservatives and their compromised media appendages can muddy and confuse the truth …..is one more day that these enemies of America can avoid the legal ramifications of their numerous 'discernable reality" crimes.
Have you noticed that there's very little coverage of torture now? Reality has, once again, been successfully created…..and nobody is interested in all that torture stuff anymore. Why?
Because the latest "created reality" is that Judge Sonia Sotomayor is a racist bigot, don't ya' know.
