#rsrh Gordon Gecko: misquoted all these years?

As Jim Geraghty points out, if you actually watch the speech that Gecko made in Wall Street…

…it’s actually a pretty harsh critique of precisely the kind of crony pseudo-capitalism that has long been a drag on the economy… particularly under this administration, which apparently takes the position that the biggest problem with our current semi-free market system is that there weren’t enough Democratic clients getting their cut.

Of course, expecting anybody who chants “Greed is Good!” in an ironic sort of way to get that the fictional Gecko might have agreed with them on a couple of things is as about as futile as… well, as expecting that anybody who used ‘reality-based community’ as a badge of honor to understand the utter inanity of adapting it as such.  I mean, look at the full quote:

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,” he continued. ”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.”

Now, it must be admitted that it’s entirely possible that Ron Suskind just made that quote up: but even if he did… well, I’ve noted this before, but damn: he just nailed the Online Left on it, didn’t he?  The actual grownups went off and did things, and the netroots watched, and are still watching, and brag about it.  And they’ll probably keep mangling that Gecko quote, too.

Moe Lane