At Daring Fireball, John Gruber unpacks the lies and illogicalities in a three-sentence statement from the president-elect’s transition team: 235 words to parse just 42.
I recall the long-infamous 2002 statement from “a senior adviser” to George W. Bush, widely reported to be Karl Rove:
“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.”And we know how well that worked out through eight years of W. “We create our own reality,” or more recently, “There‘s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore of facts”: it’s postmodernism with a vengeance.
See also George Orwell on historical truth and totalitarian history.
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Regarding this declaration: "Put aside that the statement doesn’t even claim the report is false — the implication is that it doesn’t matter whether or not Russia interfered in a U.S. election to help one side, when, clearly, anyone with an interest in ours being an honest democracy would call for a thorough and immediate investigation of these claims," who, then, has issued that clarion call, and what is our still-in-power government doing about the allegations?
Does "lame duck" mean sit back and let everything fall to pieces, because soon enough it won't be their problem? What happened to honor-bound journalism, that risked everything to get to Truth?
I hope that the New York Times and Washington Post and others hit hard on these questions. It feels like reality has exceeded the boundaries of what’s plausible or possible.
But how can words be false? It would have been better, if Gruber had been less hyperbolic.
Maybe he was thinking of Mary McCarthy’s famous remark about Lillian Hellman: “I think every word she writes is false, including ‘and’ and ‘but.’”
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