My pot, your kettle?

Roger:

The last line of your quote of William Kristol’s piece in your post reads as follows:

“All of this will be in the cause of trying to prevent the American people from arriving at their own judgment of Sarah Palin.”

The context of this remark is the Sarah Palin brouhaha and how he believes the left will paint her. Doubtless he is correct.

Yet the purpose of this and thousands of kindred statements, including most of your spin posts, is to “prevent the American people from arriving at their own judgments”. Because that is the nature of political rhetoric: to persuade the Brights and the dims, the unwashed and the perfumed, to lock step to the point of view of the persuaders. Thought that mediates such rhetorical inoculations must itself be disintermediated through yet other vaccinations. For such dissonant thought can only be not only wrong but also evil—the handiwork of Beelzebub himself.

To claim that neither the left nor the right is in the business of bamboozlement is to live with a mystified cynical irony in which I hold that my speech is pure whilst the speech of my other is pure malevolent drivel.

Let us all, then, own up to the fact that we all spin because the nature of this beast called politics is that it is a discourse so impure and vexed that its open-ended messiness necessitates its rhetorization. The spin meisters of both left and right know in their hearts they are right (and good, if not also beautiful) and what both want to do is to have others buy their wares without hesitancy so as to free them from the bane of the unfreedom of their false judgments.

Thus in this year of living hysterically, we should resolve to:

Let no pot call any kettle black.