Steven Douglas Maloney

Posts Tagged ‘Deliberative Democracy’

The Washington Post is up in arms about the truth with an article about falsehoods perpetuated by both campaigns and the EJ Dionne question “Does the Truth Matter Anymore?” Candidates poison the information market for their own gain, embarrssing themselves with such nonsensical logic as Republican Strategist Mr. John Feheery’s analysis in the article:

“The more the New York Times and The Washington Post go after Sarah Palin, the better off she is, because there’s a bigger truth out there and the bigger truths are she’s new, she’s popular in Alaska and she is an insurgent,” Feehery said. “As long as those are out there, these little facts don’t really matter.”

I do regret missing that day in philosphy when we examined the relationship between the varying sizes of facts. Of course, the reason why men and women of great accomplishment are forced to engage in such mind-numbing behvaior every election season (and it would be impossilbe to say that anyone who ran for President in either field was not a person of remarkable accomplishment) is because the competition for elective audience demands it.

No matter that a free and independent mind should rather incur physical pain than say such stupid things without accepting correction and apologizing, the core problem is the Mr. Feehery is, in his own perversley put way, telling the truth about what does and does not work in democratic politics in our age.  What he does for a living works. And before you start thinking up examples of people victimizing others that “work” for the vicitimizer like a sotry about an excellent bak robber or some such thing, you can spare me right now. It seems quite obvious that there is a “pull” in the information market for such lunacy, and Mr. Feehery and his colleagues and oppostie numbers on the Democratic side are as much rushing to fill demand as they are to create it. It is way harder to create demand for something than it is to supply something that people already want.

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