A post-truth era
There are still lots of decent politicos out there, but I'm frustrated with, or even appalled by, some of the most prominent ones.
I generally recoil from the kind of “pox on both their houses” talk about how “all politicians are corrupt” and that sort of thing. For all its faults, I’m with Winston Churchill, who said liberal democracy is “the worst form of government, except for all those others that have been tried”. Without modern government, as Steven Pinker has persuasively argued, nearly all of us would be a lot worse off.
But man oh man, is it ever frustrating to see major politicians and political organizations, including those I had once had a great deal of respect for (as well as those I never had time for), just blithely trample on the truth. Three examples that have been bothering me this week:
1. “I promise you, those people will pay.”
So vowed Joe Biden at a press conference, where he also promised* “there will be consequences”. For what? Doing their jobs? It’s the Border Patrol, not the Border Welcoming Committee, for chrissakes! Does he really believe these agents have done something wrong, or is he just caving to the baying hordes of wokesters on Twitter and MSNBC? I’m not sure which would be worse.
*Of course, a Biden promise and three bucks will get you a latte at Starbucks.
2. “We won on the Arizona forensic audit yesterday on a level you wouldn't believe.”
I long ago lost count of the number of times I’ve said “this is shocking, even for Trump”. I don’t know how the man continues to do it, but once again: I thought when the Cyber Ninjas “audit” of Arizona votes ended up concluding that Biden won by even more votes than had originally been counted for him, Trump would denounce their findings, claim that liberals had somehow infiltrated it, something along those lines. Which would of course be total nonsense. But I never expected him to simply deny their findings had been what we all saw they were. Unbelievable levels of chutzpah from this clown.
3. RBG a pioneering “personist”?
I’ve already devoted a previous post to bemoaning the fall from grace of the once-great ACLU. But they steered hard into facepalm territory once again this week. Here’s what they tweeted to honor Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s commitment to abortion rights:
The bracketed words and awkward phrasing are a result of their tortured attempt to make RBG (who only died, remember, just last year!) parrot contemporary woke ideology, which holds that it’s offensive to treat pregnancy as a “women’s issue”. RBG’s actual, much more coherent, statement: “The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life, to her well-being and dignity. It is a decision she must make for herself. When government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.”
This all relates back to the small but influential cadre of progressives who have redefined many aspects of gender and denounce anyone who doesn’t immediately fall in line as the worst kinds of bigot (something else I wrote at more length about this summer). They haven’t even bothered to come up with simple terms that roll off the tongue to replace what we used to call “women” (of course the vast majority of normal people do still call them that). It’s “people who menstruate”, “people who get pregnant”, “people with vaginas”, etc. Hoo boy. This is who you take marching orders from now, ACLU? As a certain ex-president is fond of saying: “Sad!”
NB: You’ll have to do without my musings for the next four Fridays. But don’t unsubscribe! I’ll be back Friday, November 5, and the first Friday of every month thereafter, for the foreseeable future. So…happy Halloween, I guess, and see you in November!