From Ron Suskind’s scary article in the NYTimes about Bush’s aversion to facts:

Forty democratic senators were gathered for a lunch in March just off the Senate floor. I was there as a guest speaker. Joe Biden was telling a story, a story about the president. ”I was in the Oval Office a few months after we swept into Baghdad,” he began, ”and I was telling the president of my many concerns” — concerns about growing problems winning the peace, the explosive mix of Shiite and Sunni, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and problems securing the oil fields. Bush, Biden recalled, just looked at him, unflappably sure that the United States was on the right course and that all was well. ”’Mr. President,’ I finally said, ‘How can you be so sure when you know you don’t know the facts?”’

Biden said that Bush stood up and put his hand on the senator’s shoulder. ”My instincts,” he said. ”My instincts.”

Biden paused and shook his head, recalling it all as the room grew quiet. ”I said, ‘Mr. President, your instincts aren’t good enough!”’

Another snippet:

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.”

Yeah, that famous Bush instinct. As he said after his first meeting with the tin-horn Stalinist Putin: “I looked the man in the eye. I was able to get a sense of his soul.” Good call, George.

3 Comments »

I was re-reading Doonesbury’s Greatest Hits: A Mid-Seventies Revue — I read from it every day because that’s how my Liberal Overlords send me their coded messages — and came across this strip from 1976, when Gerald Ford was in office and his son Jack had acknowledged that he (Jack) smoked pot:

It got me thinking. Perhaps Clinton’s “But I didn’t inhale” remark was intended as a joking reference to this strip. Then, once it got taken seriously, Clinton felt like he couldn’t correct the record for fear of looking like a liar or like someone who doesn’t take drug “abuse” seriously. Or, perhaps he just didn’t want to raise the drug issue again: “Actually, I did inhale. And I held my breath until I felt the sweet fumes aerating my brain, raising me to a higher consciousness.” (Actually, my own multi-decade experiment with marijuana led me to conclude that it lowered my consciousness, albeit rather enjoyably.)

Coincidence? Yeah, probably. But it’s Sunday, so Joho should run a comic strip, right?

A couple of pages later I found another strip that took me down memory lane:

4 Comments »

Glenn Fleishman, who you know from his work explaining wireless to the rest of us, has started a blog about, well, here’s what he says:

I’m launching this site in the interests of starting conversations about the way in which book details — author, title, subject, and even page count — are collected, sold, disseminated, updated, broken, and misused.

Take a look. It’s pretty damn interesting stuff.

4 Comments »

I only caught the last five minutes, but it seemed like Stewart is pushing harder on his shtick: Blurting out the truth. He’s becoming our public conscience. Has a comedian played this role before? There certainly have been comedians who were funny because they were truth-tellers — Lenny Bruce on culture, Richard Pryor on race, Billy Connelly on his life. But have any had the political focus and cultural impact Stewart has?

Dave points to this transcript, these bittorrent captures in wmv and avi, and this mp3.

8 Comments »

Fascinating article by Noam Scheiber in The New Republic that tries to discern what moves Bush to act. Primarily, it seems there’s an heroic narrative running through his head. The piece is filled with its own disparate stories of weird presidential decision-making that make sense within the article’s thesis.

1 Comment »

Jon Udell has posted a demo of Jot; you see the screen and hear Jon’s interview of Joe Kraus, Jot’s co-founder. It looks very cool: A wysiwyg wiki with forms, email integration and the ability to pull in information from around the Web. Note: The demo loops, so if after 15 mins or so you think Joe is repeating himself, well, he is. (See my Blog Disclosure: I am on the board of advisors of Socialtext, a competitor.)

3 Comments »

Can we please just have election day already? We’ve heard everything we’re going to hear. All that’s left are $100M in stupid ads. Can we please just get it over with tomorrow?

Thank you.

7 Comments »

I heard the last five minutes of NPR’s On Point show tonight, just as Jay Rosen was explaining why Farnaz Fassihi’s email about the reality of life in Iraq has hit so hard when other journalists have discussed the same issues in print. I was in the car, so I won’t do Jay’s point justice, but he said that it was a matter of language and tone (what I might call “voice”). The official reportage keeps itself flat and safe, Jay said (approximately) because there are so many forces ready to pounce at the slightest sign of “bias.” So, when we hear a voice that speaks the truth and that “bears witness” (Jay’s exactly-right phrase), we listen.

My sense was that most of the show was devoted to the question of why Fassihi’s email evoked such a reaction, and Jay banged the nail on the head for them. They should have asked Jay first, and then they would have 55 minutes to talk about John Edward’s hair or W’s back lump…

1 Comment »

Wendy the Redhead and Joey the Accordian Guy are getting hitched. And they have already produced a bouncing baby blog. (Dowbrigade has a charming post about this happy event.)

2 Comments »

AKMA takes issue with Steven Johnson‘s assessment of Derrida, which I had pointed to.

AKMA, who seems disappointed that Steve thinks “the lessons of deconstruction were fundamentally small ones,” writes:

I think one might argue that “deconstruction” was a merely instrumental sidetrack for Derrida, whose greater projects involved explorations of metaphysics, justice, and meaning. He undertook deconstruction as a throat-clearing — then he spoke, ardently and forcefully, on topics which other people wanted to claim that he couldn’t consistently speak.

I never got past the throat-clearing and thus Steve’s assessment rings true to me; the Derrida I tried to read seemed to take throat-clearing as its subject. I couldn’t find any engagement in a matter beyond itself, and it seemed not playful but irritating and smug. (I am not saying I’m right. In fact, I’m pretty much saying I’m wrong.) AKMA recommends Derrida’s Limited Inc. as a good place to start understanding Derrida, so I’ve ordered it from Amazon. AKMA hasn’t led me astray yet. (And is this an appropriate place to again recommend AKMA’s intro to PostModernism?)

1 Comment »