http://nytimes.com/2007/04/24/opinion/l24dowd.html

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Published: April 24, 2007

To the Editor:

Re “Running With Scissors” (column, April 21):

While Maureen Dowd hints at hypocrisy by denouncing presidential candidates for building fancy houses or spending big money on haircuts, we should all remember how weak the connection is between personal wealth and public policy.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was among our richest presidents. He wore elegant suits, lived in the mega-mansion of Hyde Park, and was no stranger to the social life of the richest in the nation — during the depths of the Depression. Yet no president before him and none since have done as much for the poor, the hungry, the neglected.

What mattered then, and what matters now, is what the president does for the people. The rest is a monumental distraction.

Katherine S. Newman
Princeton, N.J., April 21, 2007
The writer is a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University.

We should also note that FDR was reviled by many rich twits as a traitor to their class. No such epithets are earned by most of our millionaire punditocrisy, who descend from their penthouses to put on makeup and get coiffed and go on TV, where they revile John Edwards for being rich and for going on TV all coiffed and made up. The more those rich twits revile Edwards, the more I think he might be a class traitor worth voting for.

Some more from Walcott's extraordinary speech at Hilton Head.

Yes, what Svensker said: this is a speech that should make you cry, especially the excerpt from the McClatchy Baghdad blog. If that doesn't make you cry, you may have the makings of a pundit.

Touching on many issues, Walcott finally gets to the issue of truth.

Relying on The Times, or McClatchy or any other news sources, for the truth is infinitely preferable to the pernicious notion that there is no such thing as truth, that truth is relative, or that, as some journalists seem to believe, it can be found midway between two opposing arguments.

Halfway between say, slavery and abolition, or between segregation and civil rights, or communism and democracy. If you quote Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Winston Churchill, in other words, you must give equal time and credence to Hitler and Joseph Goebbels.

That idea that truth is a social construct first appeared in academia, as a corruption of post-modernism, but now it's taken root in our culture without our really realizing it or understanding its implications.

What began with liberal academics arguing that the belief of some Southwestern Indians that humans are descended from a subterranean world of supernatural spirits is, as one archaeologist put it, "just as valid as archaeology", has now devolved into the argument that global warming is a liberal invention.

As NYU philosophy professor Paul Boghossian puts it in a wonderful little book, "Fear of Knowledge":

" . . . the idea that there are many equally valid ways of knowing the world, with science being just one of them, has taken very deep root."

All knowledge, in other words, Boghossian explains, depends on its social, political, religious or other context, an idea that evolved, if you will, from Kant, Hume, Nietzsche, Hegel and William James.

Although this kind of thinking, either relativism or constructivism, in the language of philosophy, started on the left, conservatives feel empowered by it, too, and some of them have embraced it with a vengeance, on issues ranging from global warming and evolution to the war in Iraq, which until very recently they insisted was going well and didn't appear to be only because liberal, anti-American journalists weren't reporting all the good news that they just knew was out there somewhere in Diyala province.

"Journalists live in the reality-based world," a White House official said to Ron Suskind, writing for The New York Times Magazine back in the headier days of 2004. "The world doesn't really work that way any more. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."

I respectfully disagree.

The Church was wrong, and Copernicus and Galileo were right.

The Earth is not flat, and men did land on the Moon.

There is not one truth for Fox News and another for The Nation.

Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling were wrong, no matter how devoutly they may have believed their own propaganda.

President Bush was wrong to think that it would be a simple matter to make Iraq the mother of all Mideast democracy.

Or, as Georges Clemenceau said when he was asked what he thought historians might say about the First World War: "They will not say that Belgium invaded Germany."

I'm not talking here about matters of taste or of partisan politics or, heaven help us, of faith: Whether Monet or Manet was a better painter; or whether Jesus was the Messiah, a prophet or a fraud. Those are personal matters: beliefs, opinions and preferences of which we, and hopefully our Iraqi friends, must simply learn to be more tolerant.

But as Harry G. Frankfurt, an emeritus professor of philosophy at Princeton, puts it in his marvelous little book, "On Truth" (the sequel, I tell you truly, to his first classic, "On Bullshit"):

"It seems ever more clear to me that higher levels of civilization must depend even more heavily on a conscientious respect for the importance of honesty and clarity in reporting the facts, and on a stubborn concern for accuracy in determining what the facts are."

There you have it. That is why I do what I do.

- - John Walcott

John Walcott is one of the reporters featured on "Bill Moyers' Journal" on Wednesday night on most PBS stations.