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Victor Davis Hanson: The Legends of Our Fall
[AmGreatness] The left-wing postmodern idea of "truth" as a mere pick-and-choose official narrative is now normal."When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. " — Carleton Young in "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" The main thing that every political campaign in the United States demonstrates is that the politicians of all parties, despite their superficial enmities, are really members of one great brotherhood. Their principal, and indeed their sole, object is to collar public office, with all the privileges and profits that go therewith. They achieve this collaring by buying votes with other people's money. — H. L. Mencken Many politicians at one point or another live by lies—if they can get away with them. Our supposed sentinels, the media—self-defined as independent, cynical, and skeptical journalists—are supposed to separate political fictions from truth. Legends As Facts Of course, sometimes they used to do that—if only selectively. There were Communist sympathizers in the Roosevelt Administration and holdovers in the 1950s deep state. But the Red Peril was not always what the demagogic Joe McCarthy claimed when shaking his lengthy, indiscriminate "lists" of "commie" names and crimes. Once U.S. Army counsel Joseph Welch, Edward R. Murrow, and assorted journalists began to demand proof of all of McCarthy’s charges, his public following dissipated. The George W. Bush Administration in its case to remove Saddam Hussein unwisely ignored all the 23 bipartisan writs authorizing the use of the force by the Congress. Instead, it rhetorically bundled all congressional authorizations into one case against Saddam Hussein: the existential threat of huge Iraqi stockpiles of deliverable "weapons of mass destruction." After Saddam’s removal, U.S. forces did not find depots of poisonous and nerve gases. Whether they were nonexistent, or moved stealthily to border dictatorships like Syria or even Iran, or were destroyed no one knew. The public only remembered the government assurance that WMDs, the popular justification for the preemptive invasion, would be there upon U.S. arrival—a narrative that the media originally did not question and then later swore that it always had been skeptical as it led the cheer: "Bush lied, people died." Noble Lies So there are lots of legends common across the political spectrum. Yet those of the Left are quicker to become fact. They become "truthful" because of the current appeasing progressive octopus of traditional media and Silicon Valley. In other words, some untruths become either "noble lies" that serve communitarian purposes or canonized lies that would cause too much collateral damage if exposed. The lie, or at least an unproven "truth," soon becomes so institutionalized that the effort to challenge, or even modify it, is seen as corrective medicine far worse than the disease of the lie. From the health of FDR late in his third term, to "family man" JFK, to the moral "lion of the Senate" Teddy Kennedy, our media printed legends when facts were considered too heretical or injurious to themselves and their icons. Yet when an ideological media decides to print legends, then we all descend into a nation buttressed by lies. Russian collusion, the plague, 2020 honest election, January 6th and other ignoble lies. Posted by: JohnQC 2021-03-15 |
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