It's time we began charging people like Liasson with knowledge of things in the public domain that they know or should know and that mark them as spreaders of blatant untruth. There is such a thing as fairness, but there is also fairness to a fault.

A court of law facing a reneger on a contract who claims never to have read its words will not throw up its hands and call it a day just because forced confessions are barred from (the better parts of) our judicial system. The judge will impute knowledge of the operative terms. This is also how it goes in daily life: we ascribe knowledge whose possession falls squarely within the field of one's voluntarily assumed role. Life depends on the practice, not least for its salubrious effects on personal responsibility and autonomy. We do not probe one another's brains with MRIs or carry fold-up waterboards around to use whenever questions of subjective veracity arise. We hold people to the standards they hold themselves out under.

The court of public opinion is no different. In fact "liar" is about the least insulting term I could come up with for Liasson in light of Glenn's abundant evidence and considering she will never go to jail on our say-so.

If she then wants to clear herself of the charge by confessing to being a blithering idiot who doesn't know the first rules of her trade, she is free to do so. But a definite accusation grounded in journalistic standards is likelier to garner a response than a mixed message that presents progressives as once again falling all over themselves in an effort to be fair to a fault. There's fault, to be sure, but it's elsewhere. Let's not lose sight of it.

One of the "best" answers comes from from "The Authoritarians", based on research done since 1966 by Professor Bob Altemeyer (John Dean refers to his research in books such as "Conservatives Without a Conscience"):

How Authoritarian Followers Think:

1. Illogical Thinking

2. Highly Compartmentalized Minds (poor integration of contradictory ideas)

3. Double Standards

4. Hypocrisy

5. Blindness To Themselves

6. A Profound Ethnocentrism (dividing the world into in-groups and out-groups)

7. Dogmatism (unchangeable, unjustified certainty)

From the last pages of the book:

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The Short Run Imperative: Speak Out Now or Forever, Perhaps, Be Silenced

…We’ve got to act now. I say this with some hesitation. I’ve been studying authoritarianism since 1966, and I’ve been publishing my findings since 1981… Here’s how I put it in 1996 at the end of what I intended to be my last book on the subject: “I am now writing the last page in my last book about authoritarianism. So, for the last time, I do not think a fascist dictatorship lies just over our horizon. But I do not think we are well protected against one. And I think our recent history shows the threat is growing...We cannot secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves, and our posterity, if we sit with our oars out of the water. If we drift mindlessly, circumstances can sweep us to disaster. Our societies presently produce millions of highly authoritarian personalities as a matter of course, enough to stage the Nuremberg Rallies over and over and over again. Turning a blind eye to this could someday point 246 guns at all our heads, and the fingers on the triggers will belong to right-wing authoritarians. We ignore this at our peril.”

Eleven years later, as I am now definitely writing the last pages in my last book on the subject, I believe circumstances such as “9/11" have nearly swept us to disaster, the authoritarian threat has grown unabated, and almost all the protections I saw in 1996, such as a “free and vigilant press,” are being eroded or have already been destroyed.

The biggest problem we have now, in my view, is authoritarianism. It has placed America at one of those historic cross-roads that will profoundly affect the rest of its history, and the future of our planet. The world deserves a much better America than the one it has seen lately. And so do Americans.

So what’s to be done right now? The social dominators and high RWAs [right-wing authoritarians] are presently marshaling their forces for the next election in your county, state and country, are perfectly entitled to do what they’re doing. They have the right to organize, they have the right to proselytize, they have the right to select and work for candidates they like, they have the right to vote, they have the right to make sure folks who agree with them also vote. Jerry Falwell has already declared, “We absolutely are going to deliver this nation back to God in 2008!”

If the people who are not social dominators and right-wing authoritarians want to have those same rights in the future, they, you, had better do those same things too, now. You do have the right to remain silent, but you’ll do so at everyone’s peril. You can’t sit these elections out and say “Politics is dirty; I’ll not be part of it,” or “Nothing can change the way things are done now.”

The social dominators want you to be disgusted with politics, they want you to feel hopeless, they want you out of their way. They want democracy to fail, they want your freedoms stricken, they want equality destroyed as a value, they want to control everything and everybody, they want it all. And they have an army of authoritarian followers marching with the militancy of “that old-time religion” on a crusade that will make it happen, if you let them.

…Americans have, for the most part, been standing on the sidewalk quietly staring at this authoritarian parade as it marches on. You can watch it tear American democracy apart, bit by bit, bite by bite. Or you can exercise your rights too, while you still have them, and get just as concerned, active, and giving to protect yourself and your country. If you, and other liberals, other moderates, other conservatives with conscience do, then everything can turn out all right. But we have to get going. If you are the only person you know who grasps what’s happening, then you’ve got to take leadership, help inform, and organize others. One person can do so much; you’ve no idea! And two can do so much more.

But time is running out, fast, and nearly everything is at stake.

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This book is highly readable for the average layperson (it is not a clinical psychology text). The entire book in pdf format can be found here:

http://members.shaw.ca/jeanaltemeyer/drbob/