Christopher Locke toughens.
In what may have been the single most revealing paragraph anyone has reported about the Bush administration, the author Ron Suskind, writing in The New York Times Magazine two weeks before the 2004 election, recounted a conversation with a presidential aide who spoke sarcastically of journalists and their “reality-based community.” The aide, who sounded uncannily like Karl Rove, informed Suskind with great condescension that a “judicious study of discernible reality” is “not the way the world really works anymore.” The aide explained, “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.”