« Salvatore Ferragamo Meets the Solar Future | Main | News Flash: Freedom of Speech Matters After All »
April 12, 2007
Breaking the Left/Right Addiction
Like crack cocaine, the addiction to the false dichotomy of left/right politics is a hard one to break.
Take for example my blog entry a few weeks ago about Fox News host Bill O'Reilly. He inaccurately said that the estimate of 600,000 casualties in Iraq was from a "far left website."
|
In reality it was an epidemiological study from The Lancet. A nearly 200 year old scientific journal is "a far left website?" A wee bit of a stretch, no? |
I cited the Washington Post as my source and a few objected because, well "the Washington Post is biased to the anti-war left!"
Is that a valid point or an argumentum-ad-hominem meant to relieve the "cognitive dissonance" in the minds of those who support the war?
Hmmm. Maybe cranking up the dissonance will help us find out ...
If the Washington Post is so "far left" and "anti-war," then why is the antiwar.com blog accusing the Washington Post of being a mouth-piece of the pro-war "neocons?"
So, which is it?
Is the Washington Post pro-war or anti-war?
Left or right?
None of the above?
You got me on that one. I have no idea.
What I do know is ...
1. Being "anti-war" doesn't make one a member of "the left" or "the right."
2. Mischaracterizing information doesn't make one a member of "the left," "the right," "the war party," or "the anti-war movement." It just makes one inaccurate.
3. When people refer to "the left" or "the right" they are rarely talking about the same thing.
A hopeful note: maybe clear thinking is the new trend - my new book debuting last week on the Wall Street Journal best-seller list could be interpreted (by my very unbiased estimation) as a good sign.