April 29, 2011 12:59 AM UTC

Drowning Reason in the Bathtub

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• by: Colorado Pols

Food for thought from Politico:

President Barack Obama’s appearance Wednesday in the White House briefing room to present a documented rebuttal of suspicions that he was not born on U.S. soil was more than just a surprise. It was a decisive new turn in the centuries-long American history of political accusation and innuendo.

By directly and coolly engaging a debate with his most fevered critics, Obama offered the most unmistakable validation ever to the idea that we are living in an era of public life with no referee – and no common understandings between fair and unfair, between relevant and trivial, or even between facts and fantasy…

“There are no more arbiters of truth,” said former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs. “So whatever you can prove factually, somebody else can find something else and point to it with enough ferocity to get people to believe it. We’ve crossed some Rubicon into the unknown.” [Pols emphasis]

We can think of all kinds of places, both national and local, where that last comment from Robert Gibbs is applicable. From discredited rumors about President Obama’s citizenship and “death panels” to the rote insistence by many Colorado Republicans that new protections on oil and gas drilling caused the industry to “flee,” or illegal immigrants are swinging our elections, or impending gun confiscation…”thousands of Amazon.com jobs lost…”

You really can’t deny it. It’s the same mendacity at work, and the same irresponsible factlessness going more or less unchallenged in the media: whether the press considers refuting nonsense over and over beneath them or some other reason, plainly absurd and even libelous ravings don’t get called out as such. Too often they are allowed to fester, and be repeated without any fact-checking or even a counterpoint, until they assume “legitimacy” out of sheer inertia.

In the service of people who, be assured, know better–just like the “death panels,” people who know perfectly well what the facts are stand ready to benefit politically from widely-held nonsense that goes unrefuted. Political calculation, from Fox News and talk radio all the way down the messaging food chain, is now more important than the facts. Or even shame.

It’s not hopeless, but if you hit bottom this hard as a culture, you’re supposed to take note.