Chief Justice Roberts has given Mitt Romney a key attack: The president is a tax-and-spend liberal bent on expanding government to unprecedented levels. And the presumed Republican nominee knows it: “If we want to get rid of Obamacare, we’re going to have to replace President Obama,” he said from a rooftop in Washington overlooking the Capitol. “What the court did not do on its last day in session, I will do on my first day if elected president.”
So, for Campaign 2012, it’s game on. And for his part, Mr. Fleischer regained his pithy pundacity after digesting the high court’s ruling. “Mitt Romney will appeal this decision to the American people on November 6th. Oral arguments are already taking place.”
Dr. Sanity has surpassed herself in her comment on the SCOTUS decision. I highly recommend you read her blog on this, and here is a cartoon from her blog. She is one of my two favorite blogs and she is especially intelligent, as some of you know. She quotes Stephen Hicks with regard to this delusion of the Post-Modern, one of my themes, but here so excellently defined.
To the modernist, the "mask" metaphor is a recognition of the fact that words are not always to be taken literally or as directly stating a fact--that people largely use language elliptically, metaphorically, or to state falsehoods, that language can be textured with layers of meaning, and that it can be used to cover hypocrisies or to rationalize. Accordingly, unmasking means interpreting or investigating to a literal meaning or fact of the matter. The process of unmasking is cognitive, guided by objective standards, with the purpose of coming to an awareness of reality.
For the postmodernist, by contrast, interpretation and investigation never terminate with reality. Language connects only with more language, never with a non-linguistic reality....
For the postmodernist, language cannot be cognitive because it does not connect to reality, whether to an external nature or an underlying self. Language is not about being aware of the world, or about distinguishing the true from the false, or even about argument in the traditional sense of validity, soundness, and probability. Accordingly, postmodernism recasts the nature of rehtoric. Rhetoric is persasion in the absence of cognition....And so given the conflict models of social relations that dominate postmodern discourse, it makes perfect sense that to most postmodernists language is primarily a weapon.
This explains the harsh nature of much postmodern rhetoric. The regular deployments of ad hominem, the setting up of straw men, the regular attempts to silence opposing voices are all logical consequences of the postmodern epistemology of language. Stanley Fish, as noted in Chapter Four, calls all opponents of racial preferences bigots and lumps them in with the Ku Klux Klan. Andrea Dworking calls all heterosexual males rapists and repeatedly labels "Amerika" a fascist state. With such rhetoric, truth or falsity is not the issue: what matters primarily is the language's effectiveness.
Language as a weapon, people, is used not only by Americans, but by Europeans as well, which is why we Catholics must not only put on the mind of Christ, but speak truthfully and clearly.
