White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

  • Home
  • King’s Commentaries
  • Random Features
  • Photos
  • Public Speaker
  • WHC Episodes
  • About WHC
  • Carrying Stations
  • ME/CFS Alert
  • Contact Us

Naming the Decade of Arbitrary Facts

December 24, 2009 by Llewellyn King 4 Comments

Tradition dictates that we now play “Name That Decade.” To play the game, we need to list the seminal events of the past decade.

Dominating was the bloody, evil and heinous attack on the World Trade Center, setting Christendom at odds with the Muslim world and causing people all over the world to wonder where and why Islam had gone so wrong.

The decade had begun with an enthusiastic innocence about the United States being the only superpower and under its new president, George W. Bush, becoming a kind of international homebody: no nation-building, foreign adventures or radical changes at home.

The Bush administration was to be about creating an echo of Ronald Reagan. If there were to be bumps, they would be the bumps necessitated by the need, as seen by Bush and his supporters, to eradicate the worst excesses of Clintonism.

Out went treaties — especially the Kyoto Protocol — and in came a kind of arrogance through ideology. To win was simple: Straighten up and think right. If you got the philosophy right, everything else would fall into place.

Oddly, this was the same thinking that bedeviled countries in Europe and Africa after World War II. Successive British Labor governments, starting with the Attlee government of 1945-51, said as much. They believed in the theory of pure heart: Get that right and everything else would work out.

In Britain it meant financial crisis after crisis; and the uncontrolled growth in trade-union power, accompanied by a surge of immigration from former British possessions including Pakistan, Bangladesh, India the Caribbean and Africa. Islam gained a foothold in Britain that looks like a bridgehead today.

Reality met liberalism and trounced it. Having the right philosophy turned out to be more liability than asset when it came to governing.

But philosophy — dogma really — retains its allure for the right as well as the left. The Reagan years left the impression that if you had the right philosophy, you could accomplish big things. If George W. Bush had any far-reaching idea, this was it: Get the philosophy right and the walls of any evil empire will tumble, including militant Islam.

So began one of the decade’s outstanding aspects: the manufacturing of facts to justify actions motivated by, er, philosophy.

Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair believed so fervently that all people yearned for democracy and only bad leaders kept them from being free in the Western way, that they manufactured facts about Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

This led to the real awfulness of this decade: the idea that facts do not matter. The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat from New York, said you are entitled to your own opinions, but not to your own facts.

Alas, the first decade of the new millennium became a place where rhetoric is uncontaminated with facts.

Do you prefer the fact-free or the lying decade? Politicians lied, but they always have.

The decade ended with another seminal event: the election of Barack Obama as president.

Again, there was euphoria. It did not last. The great expectations of the campaign were dampened by realities of governing.

The man who was voted into office to end the American wars in the Middle East found that in Afghanistan, he had facts that required an extension, an escalation. He never revealed these facts. The right clapped with one hand and the left sank into misery.

The mid-term elections in 2010 will pit left-wing facts against right-wing facts. But they are not facts; they are claims posing as facts — about war and peace, energy and climate, immigration, health care and taxation. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

Email, RSS Follow
Email

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: 2000-2010, 9/11/2001, President Barack Obama, U.S. presidential election 2008

Comments

  1. Ray says

    February 16, 2010 at 8:14 am

    Keep your facts, I’m moving to Costa Rica

    Reply
  2. Ray says

    February 16, 2010 at 8:14 am

    Keep your facts, I’m moving to Costa Rica

    Reply
  3. Realist says

    February 16, 2010 at 1:19 pm

    How about that! Despite all of the doctrinaire right wing BS about the left and its almighty power over business and government, there is almost a hint of a glimmer of reality being realized – if only in the last paragraph.

    There may yet be hope after all!

    Reply
  4. Realist says

    February 16, 2010 at 1:19 pm

    How about that! Despite all of the doctrinaire right wing BS about the left and its almighty power over business and government, there is almost a hint of a glimmer of reality being realized – if only in the last paragraph.

    There may yet be hope after all!

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

White House Chronicle on Social

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Vimeo
  • YouTube
Many Newspapers Are on Death Row; Will They Be Reprieved?

Many Newspapers Are on Death Row; Will They Be Reprieved?

Llewellyn King

Newspapers are on death row. The once great provincial newspapers of this country, indeed of many countries, often look like pamphlets. Others have already been executed by the market. The cause is simple enough: Disrupting technology in the form of the internet has lured away most of their advertising revenue. To make up the shortfall, […]

Fighting Wildfire With Fire, Lessons From Georgia and Florida

Fighting Wildfire With Fire, Lessons From Georgia and Florida

Llewellyn King

Did the fire at the end of Walt Disney’s iconic animated movie “Bambi” prejudice the country against forest management with controlled burning? Maybe so. The U.S. Energy Association in February presented a virtual media briefing on the fire threat in the West and the Southwest this year. The prognosis, especially from the weather forecasting company […]

Dark Clouds on the Horizon for Electric Vehicle Batteries

Dark Clouds on the Horizon for Electric Vehicle Batteries

Llewellyn King

The move to renewable energy sources and electrified transportation constitutes a megatrend, a global seismic shift in energy production, storage and consumption. But there are dark clouds forming, clouds reminiscent of another time. The United States has handed over the supply chain for this future to offshore suppliers of the critical materials used in the […]

The Threat of Nuclear War and the License It Has Given Putin

The Threat of Nuclear War and the License It Has Given Putin

Llewellyn King

History isn’t short of people to blame. You could say of the present world crisis that it was former president Barack Obama’s fault for not getting tougher with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Syria. You could blame former president Donald Trump for giving Putin a sense of entitlement and for undermining NATO, seeing it as […]

Copyright © 2022 · White House Chronicle Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in