Reality Bites

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 discernable 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 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 study what we do."
-- A senior Bush adviser summarizing the Bush team's way of thinking to journalist Ron Suskind in the summer of 2002