Author Ron Suskind in an article in New Your Times Magazine quotes a top Presidential aide as saying that people like Suskind are in what the Administration calls “the reality based community” – people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernable reality. That’s not the way the world rally works anymore”, the aide told Suskind.

What followed was ominous as the Senior Advisor cautioned, “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."

“We are making good progress.” “Freedom is on the march.” “The world is safer now because we acted.” “Our economy is healthy and growing”. These are examples of the Administration’s new realities that have no relation what-so-ever to facts – concrete examples of what Suskind says is a Presidency based on faith – not faith in God but faith that the New American Empire can create new realities simply by saying they are so. For the President Bush the solution comes first and the facts will follow.

Take the Bush solution for Social Security as an example. We will let younger workers hold out a portion of the Federal Insurance Contribution Act deduction from their paychecks and set it aside as a retirement account owned by them and vested in them and their heirs. Removing that chunk from the Social Security Trust Fund will somehow make it possible for the Social Security System to meet its obligations to the recipients without shrinking benefits; without raising payroll taxes; and enable it to do so on less money. It is not based on facts but upon faith that the facts will follow.

For more than two years we have been told that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had a fearsome arsenal of unconventional weapons; that the regime posed a gathering threat to the region and to the world; and that the primary danger was that Iraq would provide its weapons to the growing army of fundamentalist terrorists. The solution was the invasion of Iraq. Until the Iraq Survey Group made its report of its judicious examination of the facts – and even today – the Bush Administration and its coterie of cheerleaders has continued to insist that the facts would follow the solution to justify the New American Empire’s resort to war.

The President is going to bring relief to people assailed by the runaway inflation of health care costs and the inability of retired Americans to find money to pay for life saving medicines by forcing Medicare beneficiaries into private for profit managed care systems and forbidding the system from either negotiating for lower cost or permitting competition from foreign markets. Somehow encouraging corporations to export production facilities to cheaper foreign labor markets and import the products idle American factories used to make will make the economy grow. Somehow doing nothing in the face of the daily inflation in energy costs will enable market forces to bring prices down and the process of slashing revenues and spending like a drunken sailor will cut record federal deficits in half in just five years. All of those are solutions based only on the faith that the facts will follow.

Faith not fact is the President’s guide but it is a faith in a world where facts are determined by wishes. It is a world of unreality where wishing makes it so.