The barbarians have leveled the house and set fire to the fields. They advance on a loan scribe deep in the rubble. It gradually dawns on him that there's a war on, and maybe he should "fight back".
...I resisted writing about this subject precisely because I do not want anyone to confuse my own views with Newsweek's or The Post's.Logic, rationality, empiricism. That's so Enlightenment. Bush is either pre-Enlightenment or post-modernist or both. BTW, I don't think he would have much of a problem with that assertion. Bush famously remarked that the "jury is still out on natural selection". He's no rationalist.
I write about it now because of the new reports and because I fear that too many people in traditional journalism are becoming dangerously defensive in the face of a brilliantly conceived conservative attack on the independent media.
Conservative academics have long attacked "postmodernist" philosophies for questioning whether "truth" exists at all and claiming that what we take as "truths" are merely "narratives" woven around some ideological predisposition. Today's conservative activists have become the new postmodernists. They shift attention away from the truth or falsity of specific facts and allegations -- and move the discussion to the motives of the journalists and media organizations putting them forward. Just a modest number of failures can be used to discredit an entire enterprise.
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