Hubris in, nightmare out

In a much-quoted 2004 New York Times Magazine article, journalist Ron Suskind described a 2002 conversation with a senior Bush advisor - widely assumed to be Karl Rove - who added an extra gloss to Kristol's aphorism, making it clear that "reality" can mean different things to different people.

    As Suskind relates the story: "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. 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.'"

"Thanks to U.S. policies, Al Qaeda has become the vast global threat the administration imagined it to be in 2001." Big dark coming soon