The Huffington Post | The Blog: "The New Know-Nothings
There's an old saying that when the facts are against you, argue the law. But the Bushies have gone one better: when the facts are against them, they argue the very existence of facts.
As pretty much every fact has turned against the administration in Iraq, the fallback position has increasingly become: well, who can really know anything? Everything is so complex. You've got Sunnis, you've got Shiites, you've got Kurds...the truth is...well, the truth is that we can't know the truth...so how can we be held accountable when nothing is really knowable?
Of course Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their cohorts didn't invent this way of thinking. The funny thing is that the very people who claim to be moral absolutists from the heartland turn out to be arguing a variation of postmodernism -- an Eastern elitist linguistic theory laden with moral relativism.
Here's the short version of postmodernism, via Wikipedia (I know I'm distilling a bit, but this is not, after all, a peer-reviewed academic blog):
'In the broadest sense, denial of objectivity is held to be the postmodern position, and a hostility towards claims advanced on the basis
of objectivity its defining feature... all standards are arbitrary
and meaningless.'
Sound like any defense secretaries you know?
If you want to know how postmodern poster boy Jacques Derrida would have sounded in a political context, check out Rumsfeld%u2019s answer at a recent DoD press briefing when asked about the number of Iraqi security forces that are ready to conduct operations on their own:
RUMSFELD: %u201CTrying to get a single, simple answer for a complex situation where you have, I'm going to guess, 15 or 20 different categories of Iraqi security forces that have different purposes, different training, different equipment -- so the number is 171,500 currently, last time I looked -- last week. But it's made up of apples and oranges. So it isn't useful to try to oversimplify.%u201D
Of course not. It's way too complex, and way too impossible to know how many Iraqi security forces there really are.
Then we have another classic Rummy response Derrida would have been proud of, this one after Tim Russert asked him: %u201CDid you make a misjudgment about the cost of the war?%u201D
RUMSFELD: %u201CI never estimated the cost of the war. And how can one estimate the cost in lives or the cost in money? I've avoided it consistently. And how can that be a misestimate? We've said that there are always going to be unknowns, that the battle was going to change, depending on what the enemy does and how they adjust and how we adjust...%u201D
And of course there is this all-time great postmodernist Rummy riff:
'As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know.'"

NY Times Op-Ed Contributor: "IT'S summertime, and odds are that at some point during your day you'll reach for a nice cold bottle of water. But before you do, you might want to consider the results of an experiment I conducted with some friends one summer evening last year. On the table were 10 bottles of water, several rows of glasses and some paper for recording our impressions. We were to evaluate samples from each bottle for appearance, odor, flavor, mouth, feel and aftertaste - and our aim was to identify the interloper among the famous names. One of our bottles had been filled from the tap. Would we spot it?
We worked our way through the samples, writing scores for each one. None of us could detect any odor, even when swilling water around in large wine glasses, but other differences between the waters were instantly apparent. Between sips, we cleansed our palates with wine. (It seemed only fair, since water serves the same function at a wine tasting.)
The variation between waters was wide, yet the water from the tap did not stand out: only one of us correctly identified it. This simple experiment seemed to confirm that most people cannot tell the difference between tap water and bottled water. Yet they buy it anyway - and in enormous quantities.
In 2004, Americans, on average, drank 24 gallons of bottled water, making it second only to carbonated soft drinks in popularity. Furthermore, consumption of bottled water is growing more quickly than that of soft drinks and has more than doubled in the past decade. This year, Americans will spend around $9.8 billion on bottled water, according to the Beverage Marketing Corporation.
Ounce for ounce, it costs more than gasoline, even at today's high gasoline prices; depending on the brand, it costs 250 to 10,000 times more than tap water. Globally, bottled water is now a $46 billion industry. Why has it become so popular?"

Senator Harry Reid BuzzFlash Interview: "A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
EXCERPT:
BF: Why does the Bush Administration have such difficulty in leveling with the American people?
Arrogance, abuse of power. This Administration is drunk with power. They control the House and Senate and seven of nine members of the Supreme Court, and therefore, they feel they need not compromise. They need not communicate with the minority.-- Senator Reid
BF: What's the role of the President of the United States in holding such treachery accountable, whatever the legal outcome might be?
What it shows me is that the President is not a person of his word. He said almost two years ago that if anyone in his Administration was caught being involved in this, they would be fired. There is no question Karl Rove is involved in it. Evidence is heavy. The President, after finding that Rove's involved, changes his standard from 'being involved' in it to having committed a crime. Well, crimes are hard to prove, and then you go through the appellate process. What does this mean? It means the President is not a credible person. -- Senator Reid

* * *
As far as the pecking order goes, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, Minority Leader of the Senate, is the top elected Democrat in the United States. Reid is in his fourth term, and was re-elected in a hotly contested state with 61% of the vote in 2004. Reid lives in the town that he was born in, Searchlight, Nevada."