I had a long post here about the fight against comment spam. And then in an attempt to open another window and make a link I erased everything I'd written.

I just wanted to tell you about that.

I was listening to Harry Shearer's Le Show today (archived from the weekend -- following a tip from Dr. Green) and Shearer made a brief point of reading aloud a bit of the Ron Suskind article on the administration's "faith-based" worldview that I linked below. It was one of the parts that had struck me most forcefully as well:

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.''

It's all clear to me now. That was no mere "adviser". It wasn't even Karl Rove.

It was Dr. Doom. Or maybe Dr. Octopus. Or Dr. No, or Hank Scorpio, or Dr. Evil. They've got one of those guys. It had to be. They're the only ones who can talk like that and not make people giggle. Or rather, if people do giggle, they crush them with mechanical gloves and whatnot.

One wonders what happened after the "senior adviser" gave this little speech? Did he raise Suskind up using his telekinetic power over "reality," sending the journalist's rag-doll-like body hurtling back through the office door, there to languish in its feeble mortality? Did he walk out to a balcony, there to overlook his teeming army of Uruk-hai?

That said, this was only the second-most important quotation in the article. I'll get to that one tomorrow.