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by Ron Suskind
October 17, 2004
NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that
the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director,
Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed
the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that
at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets
to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
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.''
(http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html?pagewanted=all&position=)
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