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Knowing that to come right out and say this, that is, thatthere is no real debate to be had for a believer in the constitution, would leave him open to attacks from the right wing watchdog apparatus about his “liberal bias” and his “lack of balance,” he decides discretion is the better part of valor and accepts as real the patently false equivalence “demanded” by the enforcers of the Right.

As a result, we now have a population that is largely unable to discern the difference between a core constitutional right and the allegedly “competing” (but in fact intrinsically subordinate) claims of the Right and sadly, of an ever-increasing sector of the Obamite “left.”

6 March 2011

Language, “Promontory Views” and American Perceptions of the World

Imagine for a moment that you were preparing for a fact-finding trip to a foreign country and that you had to choose between background reports produced by two competing informants.

The first is by a person who has visited the place on a number of occasions in controlled situations (planned group visits, study tours, and perhaps even interpreter-enabled reporting) but does not speak its language. However, he or she has worked to augment the necessarily filtered impressions garnered during these experiences by reading a great deal about the place in his or her only fully functional language: English.