Nonsense and nonsensibility

I think above all it is this administration's full-scale assault on rationality and truth that is so deadly. It's easy to get overwhelmed by the particulars: just pick a subject, like WMD, or global warming, or the Medicare crisis, and you find yourself in an echo chamber of crazy assertions, flat denials, and meaningless pieties. The questions of what is, and what will be, those are extraordinarily difficult to even discuss amidst the noise, cant, and outright falsehood.

It's easy to think that what you're seeing is ideologues at work. But it's not that. Not at all. Ideology is just another tool for the destruction of meaning. It doesn't matter to this administration whether or not evolution gets taught in schools. What matters is that we get accustomed to the idea that truth gets decided by consensus. Because they can't rig the truth, but rigging a consensus is child's play to them.

Even if their ends are not evil -- and I believe they are -- their means are evil. Democracy is predicated on the notion that the voice of the people is both morally and pragmatically superior to the voice of the despot. They are doing everything they can to get the voice of the people to babble about nonsense. And they have had great success.