Making Up Stories

I'll admit it:  I can be kind of rigid regarding truth and accuracy.  I can operate in their presence; in their absence, my brain kind of freaks out.  I can't complete a thought or solve a problem.  I can't move forward until I am on solid ground.

Most folks are a little more flexible and this, I guess, is what makes the world go 'round.  But everyone should know about, and then stop and consider, the central theme of an article in the New York Times Magazine, by journalist Ron Suskind, published in October of 2004.   The article is about faith and the Bush campaign (it was just weeks before the 2004 Presidential election), but it is memorable - and oft-quoted - for a staggering assertion made by an unnamed Bush advisor:

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.

This is the article in which the term "reality-based community" first appeared:

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,"

This was almost exactly eight years after Fox News went on the air.  The political world was never the same again.  Truth, lies, accuracy and deception have simply become tools for use by the right wing and Republicans when they're needed to achieve a desired outcome.  The Democrats and the rest of the reality-based community have had trouble keeping up.

And then we come to the predictable conclusion:   our leaders have lost all connection with truth and accuracy.  Here is President Trump *, in his book "The Art of the Deal:"

I play to people's fantasies ... People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It's an innocent form of exaggeration—and it's a very effective form of promotion.

And Vice President JD Vance, on CNN's "State of the Nation" in September:

In a stunning admission, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, said he was willing “to create stories” on the campaign trail while defending his spreading false, racist rumors of pets being abducted and eaten in a town in his home state of Ohio.

I didn't say it, they did.  No matter where you stand in American politics, you know that your leaders are willing to make stuff up just to make you feel better.  They said so.

Unless this is all just an innocent form of exaggeration. 

* - This link takes you to a page that goes on forever, called "False or misleading statements by Donald Trump."