Lies

Dennis Prager's latest article is about how Liberals lie a lot and Conservatives don't.

I'll pause a moment to give time for the laughter to die down.

Actually he says that Liberals don't value telling the truth because we care more about our ideology.

In the hierarchy of leftist (as opposed to traditional liberal) values, truth is below other values, such as equality, opposition to war, the promotion of secularism and a number of other highly regarded values on the left.

This does not mean that the number of truth-tellers among individuals on the left is necessarily smaller than the number of individual truth-tellers on the right. It means that truth-telling is not high on the left's list of values.

I don't necessarily disagree with him here, but let's return to this topic anon.

He then brings up political correctness, which I've dealt with at some length. I need to collect that work in one spot, and will in a bit. But in brief, the term has had far more value to the right than it ever had to the left. More leftists have been sacrificed on the alter of not being political correct than Conservatives ever were sacrificed on the alter of political correctness.

He then talks how we lie when we say that President Bush lied. Yep you read that right - all those people accusing President Bush of lying are liars. And now let's get back to ideology vs. the truth. When you believe and ideology, whether or not that ideology is Conservatism, Liberalism, or Bryantism, it tends to distort the world around you. Because an ideology is true - to the believer at any rate. And should evidence arise that casts doubt on the ideology it's far easier to cast doubt on the evidence than on the ideology. You see that occasionally on the left; you see it regularly on the right these days. And it started with, yes, the unwillingness of the Bush Administration to consider any evidence that might hurt their case for invading Iraq, up to and including rejecting plans for the aftermath.

Ideology trumps truth; that's not a problem of the left or the right, but of both. And, like it or not, President Bush is a prime example of that.