Two truths

Michael Seitzman, writing at Huffington Post, has a great paragraph in a short piece about an appearance by Kate O'Beirne in which she atempted to defend Scooter Libby. Really, if you had to pick one paragraph out of the billions on the internet tubes, this one is a good candidate for "how best to explain the mess we are in."

And therein lies the essential problem - there is no longer a shared truth in our culture. There are two truths and they have nothing to do with facts and everything to do with ideology and politics. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why we have an independent judiciary, so that decisions about "truth" can be made by people who don't have a political stake in the outcome.

The conservative assault on the judiciary is one of the more dangerous things an already reckless movement attempted. Combined with a powerful propaganda apparatus, we came awfully close to a completely authoritarian government in this country. A lot of people aren't so sure the danger has entirely passed, either. Desperate people tend to do desperate things.

On the propaganda front, the sin of Fox Noise Channel is that it allows people who don't follow politics closely to claim to be informed by "watching the news," when in fact the function of Fox is to use people's pre-existing views to promote a particular political party and agenda. It's a vicious feedback loop of ignorance, resentment and hostility.

I'm trying to think of a 20th Century example to compare this technique with, but the will to triumph in doing so eludes me. If nothing else, Fox has gorgeous graphics, even if they are relatively banal.