I thought it worthwhile to re-post this quote from a time before the Tea Party even thought of being as a reminder that the current struggle between the Republican ‘Establishment’ and the Tea Party has nothing to do with the former being some remnant of the 50s-60s era of mainstream Republicans being the ‘Goo-Goo’ Party. That is the Party of Reason Based Good Government just trying to push back on Wild-Eyed Socialism. That era died in 1964 and had its epitath written with this from a Suskind NYT article in 2004:
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, 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 have gotten accustomed to citing the ‘Reality Based Community’ as just a catchphrase, an internet meme and not as an operating principle of the modern Conservative message machine as voiced here by what most presume to be Karl Rove. Karl and his counterparts in the Right message machine then and now simply don’t care for anything spelled ‘Truth’ with a capital T. Instead it is all about message reception. Ironically enough an embrace of the doctrine they otherwise denounce as ‘Relativism’. Granted the grandiosity of the Neo-Con PNAC Vulcans as expressed in the above quote has been subdued somewhat, but don’t kid yourself that the underlying pathology is not still working. After all in the words of the Ur-Father of Modern Movement Conservatism in 1964:
“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
Lets just say you can parse that statement of Goldwater to a fare-thee-well and not find any committment to ‘Truth’ as an important consideration. Because ‘Liberty’ and ‘Freedom’. And BTW ‘Capitalism’ and ‘Free Markets’