Expressed as mere opinion, as mediocritism strongly asserted, what Strauss or any honest human being has to say about certain not-possibly-true possible truths may become effectively indistinguishable from the views of cranks, lunatics, provocateurs, and traitors. To approach such not-possibly-true possible truths at all may mean asking to be counted a Nazi, for example – or even, if not worse than as a clearer and more nearly present danger, a “neo-conservative.”
If you are committed to writing, and writing, and writing, day after day, in public, in a kind of literary intestinal bypass approach to authorship, then from time to time, for most of us quite regularly, you are going to say things that you or an editor would never leave to stand in a book or other traditional form of writing. Yet the opposite of what Sullivan says is also obviously true: Blogging is protection against making a total fool out of yourself because it’s a protection against any symbolically total or definitive statement at all. I don’t need to delete my foolishness. The next post, or the one after that, or the one after the one after the one after the one after the one will do it for me.
Unlike rightwing ideologues (here’s one candidate for the title) who have attacked Joshua Green’s “Tragedy of Sarah Palin” for being non-rightwing-ideological, Andrew Sullivan takes the equally entirely predictable position that Green was too kind to the once-upon-a-time Thrilla from Wasilla. …
George Packer: The New Yorker: [It] won’t do to dig up stray comments by Obama, Allen Grayson, or any other Democrat who used metaphors of combat over the past few years, and then try to claim some balance of responsibility…
Any attempt to expose the crucifixion as mere fiction repeats what is supposed to be erased. To proclaim the falseness or the mere historicity, merely human reality of the crucifixion is to seek the death of Jesus Christ all over again, to re-crucify [h]im in stripping [h]im of divinity. Yet the same must be true of any attempt to take possession of His sacrifice, as a mere precious object to be defended against the comfort, however distorted by agony, the dying might take in it. …and so the tableau repeats itself again, and again, forever…
In order to support a strong hypothesis – that the American public has been fed a “Big Lie” about the President being an “anti-American hyper-leftist… spending the US into oblivion,” Andrew Sullivan proposes – or, rather, conducts and concludes –…
In a Facebook post entitled “Journey into the Media’s Heart of Darkness,” Sarah Palin writes of a “dark and demented conspiracy,” but no evidence of such a conspiracy appears in the material she references – 15 pages of e-mail exchanges…
