Post-Modern Politics (Import from IBD) -- This thinking is infecting all of culture (religion, politics, daily life)

Denying Truth And Rewriting The Dictionary

By ERNEST S. CHRISTIAN AND GARY A. ROBBINS
10/06/2009

We rise in defense of Merriam-Webster's. Dictionaries are important, President Obama to the contrary notwithstanding.

So is truth and so is the English language. It has expressed centuries of Anglo-American freedoms with precision and grandeur — from the Magna Carta to the Constitution.

Dictionaries also provide insights into the character of our new president and his efforts to change (to make radically different) America's long history of free markets and free people.

Barack Obama has an elastic (capable of being stretched) approach to reality. Facts that do not suit him are set aside and replaced with fabrications. The "L" word of Joe Wilson fame is insufficient to describe the skill with which the president deceives millions of people into believing fables.

He is a master practitioner of "sophistry" (subtly deceptive reasoning or argumentation). In Washington, nearly everything said or done is calculated to deceive. Many of its residents are of the fabulist persuasion, but none compares to Obama.

He casts a spell over susceptible people, rendering them unable to distinguish fact from fiction. He then whips out his magic pencil (the one with the big eraser) and rewrites the script.

In the president's revised version of history, he has not had a long and close association with Acorn. He did not nationalize General Motors and reward his supporters at the United Auto Workers with a chunk of the stock. He is not in thrall to the big labor bosses at Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. And the Democratic Party has not sold its political soul to trial lawyers who hound doctors and hospitals and increase medical costs by billions of dollars each year.

The president has also written a "let's pretend" storybook of the naive genre.

• Not all taxes are taxes; government spending is free and debt never has to be repaid.

• He and Congress have our best interests at heart and are smarter than we are. They should run everything.

• Too much high-quality medical care is bad for us. We must switch to the government brand. It's almost the real thing. It's also "free." Just take a ticket and be patient.

• Energy must be made scarce and more expensive. Never mind the job losses (more than a million per year from "cap-and-trade" alone). Forget about the economic destruction (at least $2 trillion over a decade).

• After America's factories are shut, the Chinese will give us jobs in theirs.