The truth is out of style

That was the title of the old rap hit by MC 900-foot Jesus (lyrics here). I always think of that line during campaign season, but it rings truer than ever right now.

Check out this passage from WaPo, after the piece sketches some of the flat-out lies that McCain-Palin are continuing to use in speeches after they've been debunked across the MSM:

John Feehery, a Republican strategist, said … "The more the New York Times and The Washington Post go after Sarah Palin, the better off she is, because there's a bigger truth out there and the bigger truths are she's new, she's popular in Alaska and she is an insurgent," Feehery said. "As long as those are out there, these little facts don't really matter."

That's 'a bigger truth'? Finally, at long, long last, I understand. The Republican Party is the party of post-structuralism! I had barely bothered to ponder Stanley Fish's sad NYT blog post a while back (here), where he defended Wine Spectator for publishing a review of a non-existent restaurant's wine list. This of course is his ongoing defense of his actions as one of the editors of Social Text in publishing a hoax article by physicist Alan Sokal, filled with obviously wrong information. They didn't use any peer review — they didn't, for example, ask a physicist whether this stuff was right. They just published it. This is why we have specialists evaluate material in the scholarly world. The process is imperfect, but it's way better than nothing. Most of us want the media to do that kind of work for political information.

Feehery is a step farther down the road than Old Fish, I guess: He's claiming, as I read it, that even when you know something's simply false, he's still going to peddle it.