Proud member of the Reality-Based Community

From political writer Matthew Yglesias:

One of the odd advantages that George W. Bush's nonsensical manner of running the government has provided is that it opens his administration up to so many different lines of attack that it's very hard for the anti-Bush forces to form a coherent critique. You've got Jim Henley and Marshall Whittman who agree about approximately nothing, joined in their opposition to Bush. I don't agree with either of them about much, but I certainly agree about the opposition to Bush thing. But now that shrill, Bush-hating libertarian Gene Healy is suggesting "Reality-Based Community" T-shirts it appears that the anti-Bush coalition may at last, thanks to an anonymous White House advisor, have found a unifying theme. We are not merely the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill, which may turn off some of your more mild-mannered Bush opponents, we are, proud members of the Reality-Based Community. On the other side is, well, the other guys.

Just in case you any of my few readers aren't aware of the source for the phrase "Reality-Based Community", it is from a feature article by Ron Suskind in Sunday's 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.''

I see that the esteemed progressive blogger Atrios has already signed up as a "Proud memeber of the Reality-Based Community". Count me in, too.