So what do you do when your Presidential candidate flipflops on whether Osama bin Laden has any importance to the "War on Terror", in front of a national audience, and worse, denies in the process earlier remarks which exist on videotape? You throw up a smokescreen -- taking some inoccuous remarks about the publicly acknowledged sexual orientation of the chair of your VP's campaign, and trying to blow them up into a violation of privacy. And you hope that the other guys will be too busy defending your transparently bogus accusation to properly exploit your guy's gaffe.

It's working.

Liberal blogs are abuzz with a Ron Suskind article in the New York Times which quotes a "senior Bush aide" as telling him 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.''

Well, guess what. In the campign, if they're able to pull stunts like this, then the Bush aide is right...