The past few weeks have been saturated with discussions of evidence, truths, half-truths, un-truths, and “my truth’s“.

Kerry once joked to the WaPo, “I wish they had a delete button on LexisNexis.” The funny thing is, it’s not that funny. Kerry’s not “wishing I hadn’t said that,” or “wishing I’d been more circumspect on that occasion,” or especially, “admitting that I was was wrong then and have since come to my senses.” No, the problem that gives him pause is the fact that all the pajama-clad riff-raff can keep bringing stuff up.

On the matter of the memos, Dan Rather said:

“Until someone shows me definitive proof that they [the memos] are not [genuine], I don’t see any reason to carry on a conversation with the professional rumor mill.”

Well, sheesh, Dan, what would it take? What would you consider definitive”? What is the standard of proof required for you to admit what seems, well, rather obvious to most of us?

Bill in DC quotes Talk Left’s equivocation about whether or not the Boston Globe grossly misrepresented its conversation w/ Dr. Bouffard:

Without hearing a tape of the conversation between the reporter and the source, I don’t know that’s true.

I submit that if we did have a tape of the conversation to show up, the next thing they’d start on would be the tape’s validity. It’s first-hand personal, or nothing. And maybe not even that. No, the acid test would only be hearing the conversation for ourselves. Which would mean that ALL news is unreliable, insofar as what reporters do (in theory) is to tell other people, who weren’t there, what went on.

Mark Steyn points out the pitifully shameless double “standard of proof” for news stories:

…the ”60 Minutes” crew rushed on air with a damning National Guard memo conveniently called ”CYA” that Bush’s commanding officer had written to himself 32 years ago. ”This was too hot not to push,” one producer told the American Spectator. Hundreds of living Swiftvets who’ve signed affidavits and are prepared to testify on camera — that’s way too cold to push; we’d want to fact-check that one thoroughly, till, say, midway through John Kerry’s second term. But a handful of memos by one dead guy slipped to us by a Kerry campaign operative — that meets ”basic standards” and we gotta get it out there right away.

The problem is that, for many people, the conclusions are fixed, and the evidence is as malleable as the arguments It’s post-modernism’s excuse for logic. Meaning only exists in the moment, in the speaker’s mind, or in the listener’s - “my truth” - not outside in the real world, or in any objective abstract framework of truth. And “my meaning” is “my truth”, and has just as much right to exist and “be true” as “your truth”, whatever “you mean”.

The total rejection of any objective truth absolutely requires an endless spiral of unendable arguments defending various, equally non-true, replacements for what we used to call “the truth”.

And while there’s certainly a preponderance of this on the left, at least in the MSM and among candidates, my own experience indicates that the problem is far more widespread. It stems from two things:

1. lack of the tools (i.e., ability, training, and discipline) to reason rationally (i.e., according to the rules discovered, not made up, over 2 millenia ago)
2. lack of interest in, or respect for, rational thinking as a “good” in the first place.

Look, properly prepared argumentation is hard, hard work. That’s why you see so little of it. And it’s why, when it shows up, it’s refreshing, bracing, like a splash of cold water that shocks, but then invigorates. But nowadays, it’s as though many people think words and “arguments” are so many little puzzles to be pushed around, trying to make a prettier picture of the available pieces than the opponent. Playing Tetris with the truth, so to speak, hoping to ride it out when the pieces start piling up in one place or another, find a way to drop a piece elsewhere that will undercut and remove the impact of the other pieces, and end up with the high score.

Is truth a game? Is everything just about who wins? Is there a larger meaning, a “right” that will still be “right” a generation, two, a century, many centuries from now? And does it matter to us, right now, whether we find it? Because if it does, then it’s time for us to straighten up, buckle down, and think, not feel our way to truth. Because the truth, as you know, is out there.

UPDATE: BlogsforBush has some related thoughts.