Mr. Krugman:

I first used the word "Orwellian" to describe the Bush team in October 2000. Even then it was obvious that George W. Bush surrounds himself with people who insist that up is down, and ignorance is strength. But the full costs of his denial of reality are only now becoming clear.

President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have an unparalleled ability to insulate themselves from inconvenient facts. They lead a party that controls all three branches of government, and face news media that in some cases are partisan supporters, and in other cases are reluctant to state plainly that officials aren't telling the truth. They also still enjoy the residue of the faith placed in them after 9/11.

This has allowed them to engage in what Orwell called "reality control." In the world according to the Bush administration, our leaders are infallible, and their policies always succeed. If the facts don't fit that assumption, they just deny the facts.

As a political strategy, reality control has worked very well. But as a strategy for governing, it has led to predictable disaster. When leaders live in an invented reality, they do a bad job of dealing with real reality.

and Mr. Krugman is passably familiar with this paradigm from being forced to work within a similar system

In His New Attacks, Bush Pushes Limit on the Facts
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and RICHARD W. STEVENSON

Published: October 8, 2004

WASHINGTON, Oct. 7 - From the beginning of the year, the White House has charted new ground with the sweep of its negative campaigning, starting with an $80 million wave of attack advertisements directed at Senator John Kerry that began the moment he effectively won his party's nomination last spring.

But the scathing indictment that Mr. Bush offered of Mr. Kerry over the past two days - on the eve of the second presidential debate and with polls showing the race tightening - took these attacks to a blistering new level. In the process, several analysts say, Mr. Bush pushed the limits of subjective interpretation and offered exaggerated or what some Democrats said were distorted accounts of Mr. Kerry's positions on health care, tax cuts, the Iraq war and foreign policy.

To cheers in Michigan, Mr. Bush asserted that under Mr. Kerry, the nation would have to "wait for a grade from other nations and leaders'' before acting to protect itself. Mr. Kerry has repeatedly said that he would not give up the right to act pre-emptively "in any way necessary to protect the United States,'' but has suggested that any president would need to demonstrate legitimate reasons for such an action.

To laughter, Mr. Bush said that Mr. Kerry would impose "Hillary care'' on America, a huge national health care program that would impose increased federal control over the health care decisions of citizens. Mr. Kerry's health care plan is significantly larger than the one Mr. Bush has offered, and it includes increased reliance on Medicaid and state health insurance programs for the poor. But unlike what Mrs. Clinton proposed in 1993, it would not create any big new federal bureaucracy and would retain the current employer-based system, and Mr. Kerry said he was averse to any kind of national health care plan.

To boos, Mr. Bush said that Mr. Kerry had set "artificial timetables'' for pulling troops out of Iraq, which the president warned would embolden the enemy and endanger the troops. In fact, Mr. Kerry said that he could envision beginning to withdraw troops in as little as six months, but only if he succeeded in moving Iraq toward stability, and has decline repeatedly to set a timeline.

Mr. Bush's aides defended Mr. Bush's statements, saying that the president had fairly spotlighted positions Mr. Kerry has taken over the years. "The campaign's criticisms of John Kerry are meticulous and precise and most of the criticisms involve reading back John Kerry's own words,'' said Steve Schmidt, a campaign spokesman for Mr. Bush.

But other analysts, including some Republicans, said Mr. Bush was repeatedly taking phrases and sentences out of context, or cherry-picking votes, to provide an unfavorable case against Mr. Kerry.

"So much of what they are indicting is taken out of context," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of a book on negative campaigning. "It's a matter of taking sentences out of context or parts of sentences out of context. And it's hard for journalists to write the context back in because it takes time.'

Clearly.

Although one would have thought that the journalists [sic] would have put in a little facetime on Nexis for this particular story.

In fairness, perhaps the editors cut their hard-hitting analysis of Our Fearless Leader's misstatements (some Democrats say? Lawsy) so they'd have room to squeeze in the uproarious reaction of the hand-picked party faithful in the audience.

Also, other analysts?

Sunshine, Mr. Schmidt is not an analyst. He's a paid employee of the Bush campaign whose job is to put a shiny happy face on things for the press.

I'm sure sometimes it's more difficult than others.

snuh reminds me about this.

Y'all think I'm snarky? (yes, I'm looking at you, Mr. Kuffner)

I tell you, I'm not worthy.

Nonetheless, Novak advances. He advances because of that dreary purse-lipped sadist's face of his. (You've seen that face before: the prison warden meets high school vice-principal of your nightmares, shitting on your wife's back.) He advances because his outing of Valerie Plame is suddenly being upheld as a free-press issue. He advances because he recently told an audience of Penn State students that he is only able to stand James Carville because "CNN pays me a lot of money."

But here's the worst thing about Novak. Six years ago, Novak's column was the favored destination of anonymous leakers from the office of special prosecutor Ken Starr. They gave him such nuggets as the revelation that it was their "educated guess" that Hillary Clinton would be named as an unindicted coconspirator in the Hubbell case ("Clinton's Woes Far from Over," Nov. 26, 1998). At the time, Novak had no problem being the submissive love-slave of an overzealous independent prosecutor seeking, in a clearly inappropriate manner, to try his case in public.

Now Novak is going to sit back and let people like William Safire blast special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald for going too far in hammering Novak for his sources in the Plame case. Live by the leak--die by the leak, you fucking dog.

*tingles*

because we're not going to allow the Taliban to decide there either.

Oh, wait, no. We are.

But only because we had to pull our troops out to deal with the looming non-threat of contingent possible future plans for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Otherwise, we'd be all over that shit.

A rocket has exploded near the U.S. military compound in Kabul one day before Afghans vote to elect their president for the first time.

While no casualties or damage were reported in the Friday morning attack, remnants of the hardline Taliban regime have long vowed to disrupt Saturday's poll and have already killed election workers and targeted top government officials.

Kabul and other cities have braced themselves for attacks from the Taliban fighters and their allies in the run-up to the election -- the first since U.S.-led forces ousted the regime almost three years ago.

The country's interim president Hamid Karzai who himself has been targeted and is the frontrunner among 18 candidates, has told CNN he is confident the vote will be held successfully this weekend.

"The Afghan people see this as their chance to build a better future, to take this country forward," Karzai told CNN.

"I hope those [security] preparations will be somehow be enough to prevent whatever threats or attacks that may come."

Granted Mr. Karzai is going to end up being the military dictator of [Afghanistan. It's a different country. I know that. /Bush] either way, it's the look of the thing.

I think we can all agree that we've done a fine job there.

Meanwhile, back in America, the Justice [sic] Department is offering manpower to other agencies who are stepping up their investigations of a terrorist threat to our own elections which they assure us, they have reports on, although those reports don't actually contain any information.

I'm sure that the dispersal of federal agents amongst potential voters is a regrettable side-effect of the non-specific threat process, and in no way affected Mr. Ashcroft's decision.

His caucus is going to wait to decide on Mr. DeLay's fate until they see if blatant corruption is unpopular with voters

While Republicans vigorously defended Representative Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, in the wake of a series of ethics rebukes, members of both parties said on Thursday that Mr. DeLay, a tough-talking Texan who holds a tight rein over the House, could have difficulty retaining his leadership job if his party loses seats in next month's elections.

Democrats and independent watchdog groups, reacting to the House ethics committee's decision Wednesday night to admonish Mr. DeLay for the second time in less than a week, called on him Thursday to resign the majority leader job. But the real test for Mr. DeLay will come next month, when lawmakers return to Washington after the elections to choose their leaders for the next Congress.

Well, there you have it. Want to clean up government? Vote for a Democrat.

The Annals of Improbable Research has (have?) a blog

We asked Pek Van Andel to review the world's most provocative book about serendipity. Pek is an Ig Nobel Prize winner (for leading the team that took the first MRI images of a couple's sexual organs while those organs were in use.) Here is his review.

Serendipity: the Prince’s Road

This Begriffsgeschichte, this funny, superb, long expected, instructive, entertaining, ludique, lyrical, unique text about the birth, use, diffusion, reconceptualisation of serendipity ‘in the market of words’ is fortysix years old! Merton & Barber had finished their typescript in 1958, but didn’t publish it in fortyfour years! In the nineties I got a copy of it, after writing Merton four times. I got so enthusiast about it that I asked Umberto Eco twice to use his poids to get it anyhow published. Il Mulino (The [Paper]Mill), in Bologna, did it, in 2002, in Italian. The American edition was an initiative of the social sciences editor at Princeton.

Merton, born as Meyer R. Schkolnick, became a grand old man of sociology, and died as Robert King Merton. Elinor Barber was historian and specialised in the 18th century in France.

The royal road was the way taken by a king on visit. In scientific research the ‘royal road’ is chosen by an investigator who finds what looks for. The ‘prince’s road’ is the path of a searcher who finds what he was not in quest of. The term for such an ‘unsought finding’ and/or the gift to find the unsought is serendipity. The word is two-hundred-fifty years old.

It was coined in 1754 by a British letter writer, Horace Walpole, who was inspired by The Three Princes of Serendip, in origin a Persian fairy tale of Amir Khusrau (Hasht Bihist, ‘Eight Paradises’, 1302). According to Walpole, the princes were ‘always making discoveries, by accidents & sagacity, of things they were not in quest of’. The word serendipity was first only used in literary circles. Then Harvard physiologist Walter B. Cannon, launched it in 1945 in exact sciences with his book The Way of an Investigator. Merton defined serendipity in 1948 as the observation of an unanticipated, anomalous and strategic datum that becomes the occasion of a new theory. He described it shortly as a surprising observation followed by a correct abduction (hypothesis). And hè imported the word serendipity in behavioral sciences.

Original scientific search progresses on two legs, one royal leg to test a hypothesis, and one prince’s leg to explain an anomaly (serendipity). These two methods do not exclude, but alternate, complement, reinforce each other. As the sophists said, you can’t look for the unknown, because then you don’t know were to look for. What is really new can’t be derived from the old (if so it shouldn’t be really new), it can only be found by surprise: by serendipity!

The book is: The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity. A study in sociological semantics and the sociology of science, Robert K. Merton & Elinor Barber, Princeton University Press, 2004, 313 pp, 29.95 $. ISBN 0691117543

via Random (but not really)

from the comments at Maxspeak by way of Corrente, it looks as if Sen. Warner (R-Elizabeth Taylor) is using a furtive last-minute amendment to an unrelated bill to stop the development of all offshore wind generators because there's one in the works that might affect the view at his summer house

You might want to get in touch with the relevant officials about this one.

Just ouch.

Police in Belize have arrested a Florida fugitive described by detectives as a fake doctor who drugged his cosmetic surgery patients with an animal anesthetic and left a male bodybuilder with female breast implants.

Reinaldo Silvestre, 63, was arrested in Belize City, where he was teaching and practicing medicine, the State Department said on Friday.

Silvestre fled after Miami Beach police charged him in 1999 with fraud, aggravated battery, practicing medicine without a license and grand theft in connection with botched surgeries that left his patients permanently disfigured.

Police got a tip Silvestre was in Belize and U.S. Embassy officials worked with police in the Central American nation who arrested him. Silvestre was jailed pending extradition to Florida, said Ed Moreno, special agent in Miami with the Bureau of Diplomatic Security.

Miami Beach police said in 1999 that Silvestre had no medical license and operated late at night at a clinic on Lincoln Road Mall, a trendy strip of outdoor cafes and shops.

He anesthetized patients with Ketamine, an animal tranquilizer known on the street as "Special K," police said.

They began investigating after a patient, described as a former model in her 20s, showed them a videotape she made of Silvestre operating on a male body builder who wanted pectoral implants to make his chest look more muscular.

"He ended up with female breast implants," police Capt. Charles Press said in 1999.

Police said the tape showed Silvestre jamming the C-cup implants into the patient's chest with "a spatula-type thing that you'd see in a kitchen" and sewing up the incision with crude X-shaped stitches. He said the patient awoke three times during the procedure and was told to go back to sleep.

The woman videotaped the operation at Silvestre's request because he had never performed a pectoral surgery and wanted to document his work, police said at the time.

PBS just finished off their pre-debate coverage with a discussion of DeLay's troubles and a WSJ quote about how much the medicare bill sucks.

Momentum is a beautiful thing.

And now to the debate.

Boy, does Bush look uncomfortable.

Oh, man, Bush is taking notes. These people really are slaves of magical thinking, aren't they. I'll bet Kerry changed his underwear.

I would follow up but we have a series of questions on Iraq. Boy, morning news shows sure do create razor-sharp reporting skills.

We hope that diplomacy works before you ever use force? When did Bush ever use diplomacy for anything but trying to convince the UN to agree to using force?

Yes, he was trying to get rid of sanctions for a reason. He was trying to get rid of sanctions because they were working.

Uh, yeah, Saddam was a unique threat. Most of our enemies aren't toothless.

Oh, for crying out loud, Bush cut off Charlie Gibson to tell him that the sanctions weren't working? The sanctions were working, for crying out loud. The man didn't have the weapons.

Well, no, Abdullah said that they can't hold elections in Iraq last week, I believe, but I think I'll let that pass.

Bush is bobbing his head like a pigeon. That said, the world already knows it's the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time. They also know that it needs to be fixed. They're all the more likely to follow someone who says he wants to do that.

Oh, good. Bring up Tora Bora. Bush's knee is twitching.

"I've made some decisions that have caused people not to understand our values" God, this is a slow-motion train wreck.

I've made some decisions about Israel that was unpopular.

What on earth is an unaccounted judge? If the Hague accounted their judges, would we trust them?

Woops, Kerry is quoting Bush in the last campaign talking about how he wouldn't go to war without an exit strategy and enough troops. Beautiful.

Yeah, everyone believes it was a last resort. Sure we do.

Military's job is to win the war. President's job is to win the peace. Very nice. Also he linked the chaos after our "victory" to the deaths of soldiers.

Can we say "rout," campers? I thought you could. You're special.

Oh dear. Bush made a scowling joke. How on earth was Saddam deceiving the inspectors? He said there were no weapons, and there were no weapons.

Also he said nukular.

Draft question.

Oh, glory, there's a rumor on the internets?

Excuse me, buddy. You've cut funds for the military (for the soldiers, anyway) and enlistment is way down. Don't even go there.

Our Commander in Chief just said that new vee-hickles will make us more facile.

Kerry is running down his military support. It's a long list.

Bush just cut Gibson off again. Twice.

Oh, nice. If Missouri, given the number of people from Missouri in Iraq, were a country, it would be the third largest country in the coalition.

Oh, dear. Bush's jaw is twitching.

Kerry just pulled the tax cut damaging homeland security card.

Well, yeah, if you think offensiveness is the most important thing, it's Bush's election.

We're doing the best we can on homeland security?

You know, Gibson is actually doing a reasonably decent job. How strange.

Did Our Fearless Leader have to say I'm worried three times?

Why did you cut off safe and inexpensive drugs from Canada? I haven't yet. "It looks like it's from Canada and it might be from the third world" which is why we're cutting off american drugs from reimportation. He's trying to cut off generic drug loopholes from pharmaceutical companies? In what world?

Mr. Kerry points out that Our Fearless Leader lied about blocking drug reimportation.

Bush just cut off Gibson again.

Bush says it's OK what he did because it's what Clinton did. Also he said Yew-nited States.

Woah. Kerry just came out as a lawyer.

We can have health care reform, if you roll back tax cuts for americans who make more than $200k. Bush: the National Journal says Kerry is the most liberal senator. I wonder who they were quoting?

I'd love to see what those five million new uninsured think about rationed health care.

Labels don't mean anything. It matters if you have a plan. At which point Bush cut Charlie Gibson off again.

Oh, for crying out loud. We all know you didn't get into law school Get over it.

Oh, he's back at the Clinton recession. Also he's going to spend what it takes to win the war. If only that's what he was spending it on. Likewise homeland security.

I suppose that if you raise taxes during a recession, it might affect the recovery. It's not quite the same thing to cut taxes twice.

The first president in 72 years to lose jobs, and the first president to cut taxes during a war.

Gibson just asked how either of them would cut the deficit. Bush just took Kerry completely off the hook by insisting on mouthing off.

Kerry is going to pay for promising not to raise taxes in the first term, because I think the media's nothing that's not promoting itself as tax is a tax policy doesn't apply to Democrats.

Kerry said that the only people who will be affected by the $200k tax rollback in the room are Bush, Kerry and Gibson. Everyone chuckled. Bush jumped in again.

Battling green eyeshades?

Kerry references fuzzy math. I know it's verbing. I think the whole concept of fuzzy math as a political tactic deserves verbing.

Also Bush just cut Gibson off again.

Kerry always votes liberal, but he never shows up to vote.

Offroad diesel engines? Is he kidding? The man has the IRS giving the highest tax cuts for SUVs and he's an environmentalist because he's got an agreement on offroad diesel engines?

Forests are being hurt by a "lousy federal policy" where they're "not harvested"

Kerry plays the Orwell card.

Kerry goes with closing off loopholes for people who throw their jobs overseas and healthcare. Our Fearless Leader goes with tort reform.

Oh, dear. Kerry just pointed out that Bush and Cheney count as small businesses. Bush made a joke about timber.

Bush doesn't think our rights are being watered down. He says that all their actions require scrutiny. He says he wouldn't support his administrations actions if he thought they were watering down liberty. I guess there's some managerial advantage to not reading the papers.

Never let the terrorists change the constitution in a way that disadvantages our rights. I don't like the grammar, but I'm glad Kerry said it.

Embryonic stem cell research requires the destruction of a life. I'm the first president to allow embryonic stem cell research. Say what?!? Kerry, parenthetically, pointed out that the cells they would be using are from IVF, not from abortion

How does picking a Supreme Court candidate who wouldn't allow their personal opinion to interfere with their interpretation of the law square with the fact that his model of a justice is Scalia?

As Senator Kerry points out.

Surprisingly, Bush let Kerry's mention of choice as a constitutional right go right by.

Senator Kerry says that he can't legislate morality to people who don't share his religious beliefs.

Our Fearless Leader just committed to cut off federal funding for abortions.

A hospitable society? Gee whiz.

Ah, Kerry is saying that girls raped by their fathers shouldn't have to notify their fathers, and women who are going to die if their nonviable fetusses are carried to term shouldn't have to die without surgical intervention, and Bush said that it's much simpler than that.

Bush can't think of three decisions he made wrong. Anyone else having that problem?

Whoever said we shouldn't go into Afghanistan? I mean, who on stage?

How did the weapons inspector's report confirm that it was right to invade? The man didn't have weapons.

Uh, yeah, he doesn't want to embarass anyone on TV. I think we've all seen that in the delicate and friendly way that people have left his administration with Karl Rove's bootprint on their asses.

Oooh, Kerry voted against the 87 billion because he didn't want to give a slush fund to Halliburton.

In closing:

Kerry: I am on the same tip as Eisenhower and Reagan and Kennedy (not the highest bar there in some cases, but OK). I have plans for schools and healthcare and we should fund No Child and save our environment.

Bush just said it was enjoyable. I'm thinking from the look of him if he doesn't encounter a suppository backstage he's going to explode.

Nice. He wants to keep regulation down and he wants to be steadfast and despite the fact that the 9/11 Commission says he screwed up, he thinks their report was a mandate.

Thank you. We'll be here until November. Tip your waiters. Then run before they get back up. They hate that.

I hope you campers enjoyed this, because if I took a drink every time Our Fearless Leader said something that made me think it would be nice to have a drink, I wouldn't be able to type right now.

David Brooks says that Bush (did I mention he interrupted Charlie Gibson a bunch of times?) that Bush has regained his composure. David Brooks is a shrieking loon.

Oooh, Mark Shields says that Bush is like the "stereotypical male driver who refuses to ask for directions"

A beer. What a nice idea.