So, Adam pointed out the following piece by Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo: I must confess. It’s a fairly detailed picking-apart of the fairly thoroughly dishonest op-ed piece by Robert Kagan of the Washington Post from last week (A plot to deceive?).

Yes, there have always been self-serving op-ed pieces that obscure truth in their attempts to shore up a particular position. There have always been lies in the public sphere.

What is new is that the tide of such sludge seems to have risen to the point where it is drowning out honest discussion. Blame whomever you want: talk radio, vast right-wing conspiracies, astroturf campaigns, kids raised by TV shows instead of responsible adults; I don’t know. Blame the “liberal media” and rampant political correctness, if those evils bother you more.

It doesn’t matter how our civil society got broken. We need to fix it. And we need to start now. I’m not just saying that because my team seems to have been “losing” the “debate” lately. I really don’t even care about that, so much. If we’d been having an honest debate, I wouldn’t mind if the majority of my fellow citizens ended up deciding that no, my views did not represent the best course of action.

But we haven’t even been having a debate. And in the absence of such a debate (by which I mean, people openly discussing the issues in an honest effort to arrive at an appropriate public policy), we’ve got nothing. No democracy. No freedom. Nothing.

This entry was posted by jbc on Sunday, June 15th, 2003 at 11:20 am and is filed under george_w_bush. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.