Karl Rove certainly didn’t invent the polarising hardball tactics which so define the modern political landscape (that dubious distinction belongs to the very first elected official who successfully circumvented the logical faculties of some of the very first voters).

But Rove, the Texan Rasputin behind George W Bush’s perpetually befuddled American Tsar and a long-time Republican campaign strategist, did not so much refine as entirely redefine the modern political practice of not just bending but straight-arming the truth.

All politicians, at one time or another, have been known to engage in the type of Orwellian doublespeak in which words, facts and data are sometimes at complete variance with reality.

But Rove went one step further. He argued there was actually no such thing as objective, verifiable reality. Reality was what you wanted it to be, what you said it was.

Rove infamously told a reporter that the new-breed of politician he was so responsible for moulding, popularising and getting elected did not belong to what he dismissed as “the reality-based community,” those individuals and institution which believe “solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality”.

“… That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he said. “(When) we act, we create our own reality.”

What could best be called Rovism, for want of a better word, has now become the standard operating procedure for too many politicians regardless of ideology, party affiliation or location.

Belligerent ignorance is now posited as being an entirely legitimate substitute for informed opinion.

Subjective convictions are deemed to be every bit as acceptable, or even preferable, to objective facts. Wishful thinking is all too often allowed to trump expertise.

The Political Gospel According To Karl even has a few disciples in Bermuda, it would seem.

For instance, the governing One Bermuda Alliance’s oft-stated commitment to accountability and full-disclosure apparently doesn’t entirely extend to its own shortcomings.

A notorious Washington DC insider says he deposited $300,000 into the Bermuda account of an OBA-affiliated political committee which few (including the majority of the party faithful) had ever heard of.

A Premier resigns after dodging questions about the unsavory business for almost a full year. And the funds, it turns out, never reached the OBA election campaign war chest they were supposedly earmarked for.

The party chairman, a man whose name is generally considered a byword for integrity and probity, pledged a full and frank public airing of the results of his internal investigation into the so-called “Jetgate” affair, no matter what they revealed.

But a self-imposed late May deadline slipped by with no sign of the promised report.

And the only comment from the new Premier has been a rather opaque statement about the party chairman “doing what he thought was appropriate” in terms of a Jetgate inquiry rather than the full-throated commitment to transparency this sordid situation demands.

OBA politicians, understandably enough, just want the whole sorry business to go away.

But it’s simply not possible to divorce themselves from Bermuda’s reality-based community at this late stage. Answers are required about all manner of lingering Jetgate questions and they are required urgently.

The Opposition, meanwhile, has been busy creating all manner of counter-realities for itself.

There’s been the incessant parroting of unscientific, intellectually regressive and potentially dangerous nostrums peddled by recreational marijuana users who attempt to add a veneer of cultural respectability to their drug of choice by imbuing it with all manner of supposedly miraculous health properties.

Presumably the Opposition was attempting to turn a fringe issue into a possible election-winning wedge issue but its own epic hypocrisy on the matter of drug testing legislators has likely put paid to that always remote possibility.

While sitting on the Government benches, the Progressive Labour Party cheerfully signed off on any number of measures enforcing the drug testing of civil servants.

No one is likely to be any more convinced of the supposedly unselfish nature of their newly-acquired liberalism on the whole question of cannabis reform than they are of the feasibility of a Bermuda squad making it to the final of the World Cup. And winning.

And the less said about the Opposition Leader’s ongoing indulgence in the politics of the playground and his systematic abuse of Parliamentary privilege, the better.

Parliamentarians’ unfettered freedom of speech on the floor of the House of Assembly was intended to allow for the forthright discussion of matters of national concern, not overwrought and occasionally fantastical exercises in personal score settling.

Fortunately, Bermuda boasts a generally well informed and savvy electorate. They are not easily hoodwinked by such antics.

Despite what some of our more presumptuous politicians may care to believe, reality is not actually what they want it to be and it most certainly isn’t what they say it is on every occasion.