QOTD

Jeff Goldstein on the lying left:

There is a complicity and a duplicity to the entire cultural fraud, the most frightening part of which is the eagerness of so many "progressives" to will certain "truths" into power merely by the force of rhetoric, be it a reliance on repetition, denial, obfuscation, or an artificial "consensus" that gets its power from the willingness of those who hold to it to pretend to believe in the narrative upon which is based--rather than to believe in the power of that narrative to achieve an end that they consider so important that they are justified in waging a rhetorical war of "truthiness" in the service of what they consider larger and more important "Truths."

Combine those ingredients, and you have a notion of "history" that is so fluid as to be meaningless. It matters not that some Democratic presidential aspirants, for instance, voted for the war initially. What matters now is, how well are they able to walk back that support--which consists of perfunctory mea culpas followed by scapegoating of all those who "misled" them into their initial position (carefully bracketing out those on their side of the political aisle who may have influenced them), and finally, of a rewriting of events to form a convenient, plausible narrative that they can pass off to the American electorate that at once forgives them and demonizes their political opponents.

And what should be the offshoot of this type of craven politicking--that the electorate looks at these backtrackers and comes to the conclusion that they are essentially admitting they were, as elected officials, unwilling to take advantage of their access to intelligence, or that they are crass opportunists who voted for the authorization to use force because they feared a nay vote would be politically unpopular--is, sadly, being staid by a willingness on the part of the media and many on the political left to simply repeat lies and misinformation until history is replaced by "history," and their version of events, now ascendant, begins to ossify into "truth."

I like Jeff's suggestion:

But now I’m beginning to think the best way to fight back is to . . . develop a TV show around the concept of interpretation.

Something like, say, "CSI: Duke University Department of English"--where each week David Caruso hams his way through the debunking of some particularly fashionable (yet utterly ridiculous) reading of a well-known novel, the thrust of which creates the intellectual ground for false rape accusations, class warfare, and a willful reigniting of racial tensions in the service of creating the need for further examinations of those very topics.