pundits of blogistan take heed

I'm over at Ann El Khoury's reading upside down and I come across this bit I've heard before:

"A neoconservative is a liberal who's been mugged by reality."

In this smug formulation, "reality" was understood to mean violence and power — epitomized both by the terrorist attacks that brought down the Twin Towers in a hail of falling bodies and burning rubble, and by the planned U.S. response in Afghanistan and (later) Iraq. To the neocons, "reality" was bombs, blood and fire; the transformative effects of shock and awe.

In a much-quoted 2004 New York Times Magazine article, journalist Ron Suskind described a 2002 conversation with a senior Bush advisor — widely assumed to be Karl Rove — who added an extra gloss to Kristol's aphorism, making it clear that "reality" can mean different things to different people.

As Suskind relates the story: "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. 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.' "

The author of the linked piece in the LA Times is about some thesis that this whole study in Olympic class smuggery has backfired. Er. Ahem. Uh. Been catching the gloried do-nothings in Blogistan lately? What about that fabulous array of books on every aspect of the political perfidy playing out right now being released every five minutes and touted to the rafters on talk shows and blog ads?

I confess: I have the worst case of the hots for Thomas Paine. If just one of you "pundits" could get that action together, maybe my eyes would stop glazing over in front of your latest bits of erudition. Well... and I use that term advisedly.... It's really way the heck past time you stopped talking about it ("studying it"). I know the better you are at talking about it, the more people will think you're a hero, but... er... they'd be wrong, and, well, Rove would be right.