PrintAugust 13, 2008
John Edwards and the Truth Scandal
The spectacle of yet another Leftist Democrat, John Edwards, looking the American people dead in the eye and lying to them is nothing new. The news spinners of the mainstream media have tried to portray the Edwards Affair as a sex scandal. It is not. It is a truth scandal. It is, in fact, part of a spiraling truth scandal that seems to have engulfed the Left.
While it is easy to compare Edwards' infidelity to Clinton's infidelity, unfaithfulness in marriage is not the problem. Adultery is as old as the Decalogue. God thought enough about the subject to include it in those commandments recognized by Jews and Christians alike. Beyond that, Edwards's lawyer wife, like Clinton's lawyer wife, seems to have taken this breach of contract in stride.
Adultery may be an old vice, but the terrible new vice of the Left is an indifference to truth which seems to fill every crevice of the Leftist brain. When Al Gore gets up and says that global warning is accepted science, is he lying? Who knows? Gore has made such huge mistakes of fact over the last few decades that he might really believe that all scientists think that the planet is getting warmer. But Gore obviously does not care too much whether global warming is true or not. He never even pretends to listen to the other side. In fact, he acts as if there was no "other side" at all. Al Gore is grossly indifferent to truth.
When Howard Dean made a series of whopping mistakes four years ago - the "Soviet Union," in Dean's mind, was still around; presidents could "order" state legislatures to adopt Right to Work -- and it did not matter much whether this was true. John Kerry was just as indifferent to truth. As a Catholic, Kerry followed "Pope Pius XXIII," a nonexistent pope, and Kerry was sent to Vietnam by Nixon, although LBJ, not Nixon, was president at the time, and Kerry was in Cambodia over a Christmas in which he really wasn't in Cambodia. Dean and Kerry are not the sort of sleazy liars that Clinton and Edwards are, but Dean and Kerry are much more sophisticated liars: Dean and Kerry lie about reality.
The whole empire of the Left is pockmarked with gross indifference to what is true and what is false, to what is history and what is myth, to what is real and to what is illusion. When Barack Obama talks about fifty-seven states of the union, he does not really care how many states there are in our nation. Facts like that don't matter. All that matters is what has been defined as the chic Leftism of today.
So, America is destroying the planet by heating it up. It does not matter that chic Leftism not so long ago insisted that the planet was freezing and implying that this, too, was America's fault. The past as well as the future must conform to what chic Leftism demands now. Once chic Leftism told rape victims to "lay back and enjoy it," then chic Leftism insisted that the mere allegation of rape was conviction, and then when Juanita Broaddrick was brutally raped by a Leftist icon, this rape victim became an "unperson" -- no feminists championed her claim or even noted her existence. Rape, even brutal and violent rape, never mattered to feminists at all. What mattered to them was chic Leftism, an ideology that has no consistent principles except preservation of power, and no interest at all in what is true.
Orwell gave us the slogans "Freedom is Slavery" and "Ignorance is Strength." These days the chic Left takes these two slogans of Oceania very seriously. They will always tell you what eternal and unchangeable truths you must accept this week, this day, this hour. Any ear attuned to the constant buzz of its propaganda machine can listen to today's version of history or the hourly report on transcendent values by just staying very close to Academia, Hollywood, mainstream media, Democrat leaders, or any other interchangeable parts of the chic Left.
So, in John Edward's mind, he probably was not lying about an affair. If he is proven to be the father of a love child, he was not lying about his denial of paternity either. Bill Clinton, in his deposition, put the matter as well as any chic Leftist when he parried a question by asking "it depends on what your definition of ‘is' is." Exactly. This most basic verb, the word around which language itself is built, has no firm meaning to the chic Left. Prenatal infanticide of an eighth month fetus is a constitutional right of the mother, while government supervised post-natal care of a one month old premature baby is a constitutional right of the child. There is no use in trying to make sense of it all. The absence of sense, the dearth of seriousness, the denial of moral standards, the surrender of thinking, the lust for groupthink oblivion is precisely the reason for chic Leftism.
Language means nothing to the chic Left. Words themselves mean nothing. Images are everything. Fads are immutable facts. Now is the only instant of time. John Edwards has a wife who was his campaign prop. Then he met a pretty girl, and suddenly he was not married anymore. Edwards, one of the three lawyers out of the three leading Democrat candidates, had no problem re-inventing himself as a free man for his hours of physical pleasure. Elizabeth Edwards simply became an "unperson" for a few convenient hours.
Almost half of our nation has become this sort of Orwellian zombie. In Germany, its young women would be swooning at the screeching of the Fuehrer; in Russia, its Young Pioneers would be writing poems to the infinite genius of the Vozd; in China, its students would be tormenting anyone thought out of synch with the Great Helmsman. Almost half of America can actually contemplate a vapid nebbish like Obama as our Great Leader. Depending upon the polls examined, many or most Americans believe that our own government allowed the attack on the World Trade Center. Presumably that might include a majority of Democrats in America.
It does not really matter to these armies of nonsense if John Edwards lies to us or if Barack Obama cannot recall how many states are in the nation he pines to rule, anymore than it mattered to denizens of Nazi Germany that Britain held out in 1940 or that it mattered to slaves of Stalin that their friends the Hitlerites became, in June 1941, their mortal enemies.
When the voice of the Left spoke, reality itself changed.
We live in surreal, sad times. Our Living God, the only real thing in our universe, has been consigned by the phantoms of cognitions to an obscure footnote. Those values of integrity, history, reason, and love which have raised us up have been abandoned. Integrity means nothing when principles do not exist. History is wax in the hands of the hourly report. Reason is an obstacle to politically correct minds. Love cannot exist without values that last.
Just ask Mrs. Edwards. Love was supposed to obscure lust. Love was supposed to be bigger than lies. Love between man and wife was supposed to be something sacred in the Book of a Living God. But the books have been burned. The lies have been naturalized -- "everybody lies," remember? Lust of every sort -- lust for power, lust for cash, lust for fame -- all these lusts have swamped our boats. We are drowning in a gross indifference to truth.
Orwell's children are now grown up.
