Feelin' the love ...

This editorial and this article seemed to strike a chord together.

The editorial, by Steve Haycox, posits a question that has been dogging me for months - by any honest, non-partisan measure, the presidency of GW Bush has been a miserable failure, yet he receives the unwavering support of a distressingly large percentage of the electorate. How can this be?

The article, I believe, dances around the answer. A community council meeting about whether a fence around a military reservation could be moved to accommodate some pre-existing trails apparently degenerated into an angry confrontation when one participant said that the real motivation of those who wanted to save the trails was anti-military sentiment. How could they argue about a trail, one person asked, when soldiers were dying in Iraq? You don't support our troops! You hate the military!

Where the heck did THAT come from?

I'll have a lot more to say about this issue, but this is related to what Juan Cole has termed the "Partisan Epistomology" that seems to dominate public discourse today. In plainer terms, for many people, truth itself emanates from a partisan viewpoint. What President* Bush says is right, because President* Bush says it. Those who disagree are not only wrong, but entirely wrongheaded ... indeed, evil. And the emergence of facts that don't support your view are simply proof of the bias and partisanship of those who state them.

It seems to me this approach has been tried before ...