The article M Ted refers to is well worth reading. In fact, I finally bit the bullet and registered with the NY Times so I could read the whole thing. It's painless, and you don't have to give any more information about yourself than you do when you register at Mudcat.

A couple of the most telling—and scary—paragraphs in the story:

         In the summer of 2002, after I [Ron Suskind] 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.''
         Who besides guys like me are part of the reality-based community? Many of the other elected officials in Washington, it would seem. A group of Democratic and Republican members of Congress were called in to discuss Iraq sometime before the October 2002 vote authorizing Bush to move forward. A Republican senator recently told Time Magazine that the president walked in and said: ''Look, I want your vote. I'm not going to debate it with you.'' When one of the senators began to ask a question, Bush snapped, ''Look, I'm not going to debate it with you.''

I'm in the process of reading a fairly hefty book entitled The Closing of the Western Mind: the Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason by Charles Freeman. It deals with how the mingling of early Christianity and neo-Platonism—combined with the Roman emperor Constantine's becoming a Christian and thereby lending the power of the state and the force of law to religious dogma—suppressed the advance of earlier faltering but promising steps in Greek scientific thought (per Aristotle: observe, experiment, and think, the method of people such as Aristarchus, Achimedes, Heraclides, and Hippocrates) and precipitated the Dark Ages in Europe (which did not happen in the Middle East. The Dark Ages finally ended with the importation of "new" knowledge by returning crusaders and the rediscovery of Aristotle, eventually leading to the Renaissance and the rebirth of scientific discovery (this is my oversimplification, but it is essentially true).

Those same dynamics of mysticism and praying and looking inward for the truth rather than looking outward for evidence are at work among some of the nation's leaders. This accounts for their simply dismissing what is obvious to much of the rest of the world.

"If the policy is not supported by the facts, change the facts."

Can we afford four more years of this? I think not.

Don Firth