Victor Davis Hanson has a significant article explaining why it seems nothing is certain anymore in American politics, and especially the Obama administration.
"In postmodernism, facts as we know them mean little, given either that they are the domain of elites alone with the resources to pursue and master them, or, more fundamentally, are simply representations of knowledge used by the privileged for political purposes. That there are not 57 states, that the world did not save Berlin during the airlift, that Obama’s great-uncle did not help to liberate Auschwitz, that the United States is not one of the largest Muslim countries, again matter little. In each case, particular contexts and intentions — what we troglodytes might call mitigating circumstances — condition the “truth.”
That a Timothy Geithner did not pay taxes that he asks others to pay or that he must himself oversee, or the fact that a Tom Daschle insists on limousine service that he does not report as income, are simply minor distractions. Such public servants pursue a higher truth of helping the helpless, and cannot be sidetracked by constructed transgressions designed to thwart the proper cause of egalitarianism.
So without absolutes, moral equivalence triumphs. In Obama’s world, that most of the Arab world is authoritarian, plagued by gender apartheid, tribalism, religious intolerance and statism matter little. Instead, as the less powerful, their writs against us must be as valid and compelling as are ours against them.
There is no such thing as calibration, a misdemeanor of the overdog must always be equivalent to the felony of the underdog. Guantanamo is about the same as the gulags in Russia, China, or the Arab world and logically deserves as much of the world’s condemnation. In the mind of the postmodernist it matters not at all that a million Arabs live safely under the rule of law inside Israel while Jews in turn live on the West Bank in danger — in the former it is legal and right, in the latter illegal and wrong. Why? The former are without power, while the latter use it to construct a “truth.”
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After six months of postmodern governance in which words and values lose intrinsic meaning, we don’t know any longer whether tribunals, intercepts, wiretaps, Predator drone attacks, Guantanamo, Iraq, renditions, etc. are good or bad, or Obama’s salvations or Bush’s Hitlerisms. I have no idea now whether five soldiers tragically blown up in war in Iraq (is it a war now?) is news as in the days of Bush, or reduced to “stuff happens” in the age of Obama. Iran having a nuke will soon be merely the same thing as Israel having one first.
I have discovered that “fiscal sobriety” is running up a $2 trillion annual deficit, that Obama’s once taboo middle name Hussein is now a publicized entre to the Islamic world, that his once agnostic father is now constructed back into a devout Muslim, and on and on.
In other words, we now have our first postmodern president. Yes, everything is possible — literally."