Gene Lyons: To the cronies go the spoils

"It ain’t what you don’t know that will hurt you, it’s what you think you know that ain’t so." —Will Rogers

The most telling description of the Bush administration may have come from a White House aide who used the term "reality-based" as an insult. According to journalist Ron Suskind, who described the incident in a 2004 New York Times Magazine article, the aide mocked the stuffy, pedantic, presumably liberal view "that solutions [to political problems] emerge from... judicious study of discernible reality." "That’s not the way the world really works anymore, " he added. "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." Well, history’s actors are suddenly hunting for a revised script. According to The Washington Post, with the president’s poll numbers sinking, White House aides "who never betrayed self-doubt now talk in private of failures selling the American people on the Iraq war, the president’s Social Security plan and his response to Hurricane Katrina."