A pre-emptive strike against reality

In his Nation Commentary, Potemkin Government, Jonathan Schell discusses the Bush administration's complete disregard and in fact contempt of reality, the belief that they can create reality.

Misrepresentation of programs, including weapon systems, is an old story. But the installation of a system of proven unworthiness is something new. It requires not just denial--a passive operation--but an active insurgency against facts and the scientific laws that guide them, in a sort of a pre-emptive strike against reality itself.

The disorder appears in many forms. Programs announced for one purpose accomplish the opposite. The Clear Skies program dirties them. The Healthy Forests Initiative clear-cuts forests. The No Child Left Behind program, unfunded, leaves millions of children behind. Social Security "reform" defunds Social Security.

Bad news delivered by the Administration's own experts prompts attacks upon them and burial of their reports. When Medicare's chief cost analyst, Richard Foster, charged with computing the price of the President's drug-benefit legislation, tried to communicate his findings to Congress, he was threatened with retaliation. When the head of the Army, Gen. Eric Shinseki, informed Congress that several hundred thousand troops would be needed to occupy Iraq, his estimate was derided, and he was pushed aside. When the President's Assistant for Economic Affairs, Lawrence Lindsey, estimated that the Iraq war might cost $200 billion, he was fired.

And here's the beef:

Even within the Administration's inner councils, show has superseded substance. In The Price of Loyalty, by Ron Suskind, former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill has written that Cabinet meetings were not true places of decision-making, which was performed instead by an informal "praetorian guard" led by the Vice President.

Each of the lists of examples of each of these symptoms of disorder could be lengthened greatly. We are left with a portrait of a "government" whose principal activity is no longer governance but the creation and manipulation of images for political appearances. All concrete purposes, including the "war on terror," are subordinate to these ends.

This election is really a decision by the American people to live in a world of illusion or live in reality.