The Truth

37 Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.
38 Pilate saith unto him, What is truth? And when he had said this, he went out again unto the Jews, and saith unto them, I find in him no fault at all.
The Gospel of St. John 18:37-38

Something has been troubling about my review of Ann Coulter's article earlier in the day. Ann Coulter may very well believe what she writes. She may believe that we have found the weapons of mass destruction President Bush and Donald Rumsfeld was selling us on before the war. She may believe that there was an undeniable link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Ladin. I've always assumed that Ms. Coulter was a political huckster who's found a good gig, but let's say she really does believe everything she says.

Well how could you really have a debate over Iraq with Ms. Coulter? Some of the most basic facts, facts that many of her collegues have conceded, she does not accept. I don't buy many of the Administrations defenders' arguments these days, but at least with many of them you can understand the argument. The terrain is the same. With Ms. Coulter, you are talking about two different worlds.

Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt cheap that one begins to wander whether in the end anyone will want to make a bid. - Soren Kierkegaard

The problem with debating with Ms. Coulter is that simply stating the facts as nearly everyone accepts them ("No link between al-Queda and Saddam Hussein's Iraq has been proven." "We haven't found Weapons of Mass Destruction that could have been an immediate threat to the United States.") become Liberal Arguments. So you have two sides to a debate, one side expressing extreme right wing partisan beliefs and the other basically stating the facts of the case. Doesn't leave much room for a leftist argument does it?

Ms. Coulter is hardly alone in this phenomenon. Salon has a great article today on Karen Hughes, close friend and confidante of President Bush. In it, the author (James C. Moore) repeats an oft recounted tale involving Ms. Hughes and Tucker Carlson. Tucker Carlson wrote the famous (or infamous, depending) account of President Bush swearing in private and mocking a woman he was about to have executed. After the article, Ms. Hughes confronted Mr. Carlson.

"It was very, very hostile," Carlson said. "The reaction was: You betrayed us. Well, I was never there as a partisan to begin with. Then I heard that [on the campaign bus], Karen Hughes accused me of lying. And so I called Karen and asked her why she was saying this, and she had this almost Orwellian rap that she laid on me about how things she'd heard -- that I watched her hear -- she in fact had never heard, and she'd never heard Bush use profanity ever. It was insane. I've obviously been lied to a lot by campaign operatives, but the striking thing about the way she lied was she knew I knew she was lying, and she did it anyway. There is no word in English that captures that. It almost crosses over from bravado into mental illness."

So it turns out that reality itself is partisan. Not, all in all, a very comforting conclusion.