It may just be me, but every time I come across a reference to John Kerry (or any other politician) "flip-flopping", all I can think of is that episode of The Simpsons when Sideshow Bob ran for mayor.

Bob: Young friends, my opponent, Joe Quimby, is confused about your school system. Do you know what he does? He flip-flops. [does backflips; children marvel] Sometimes he doesn't know whether he's coming or going. [walks funny; children clap and cheer] He wants to sell your future short. [shrinks, walks sideways; children clap more]

(It's funnier to watch, I assure you)

We know Fox is helping write the Republican election script, but I never suspected those notoriously liberal Simpsons writers to be on the team. Damn that Murdoch!

Meanwhile, this quote from The New York Times has been making the rounds, and each time I've read it my brain has rebelled and assured me that this can't possibly have really happened. But it still makes a great story, and it sums up why admitting a mistake, changing your mind, or even having reservations about a decision are now political mortal sins: they're all evidence of reality-based thinking.

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.''