The Triumph of Truthiness

A blogger on Daily Kos today stated what's been on my mind a lot lately: "For Republicans, there is no longer any moral taboo whatsoever against lying outright." While lying isn't an exclusively Republican phenomenon, it certainly figures large for the Karl Rove Republicans. The problem seems to be that to Rove and his followers, "truthiness" is more important than facts--and, sadly, the media has played along.

Truthiness, a word coined by Stephen Colbert, was defined by the Macmillian English Dictionary as "the quality of stating facts that you believe or want to be true, rather than stating facts that are known to be true." Wishing something was true doesn't make it so: in Freud's terms, that's what creates an illusion. Illusions derive from and play to our instincts rather than our intellects.

We know all too well from the Republicans' attacks on Obama, evolution, global warming and academia how they feel about intellectualism. Bush, Rove, and his followers represent the triumph of truthiness and instinct at the expense of rational thought. You can't debate an instinct; but when does truth via instinct--truthiness--become lying?

Fortunately, two groups are fighting truthiness with truth. FactCheck.org is a nonpartisan organization that is doing the job the media isn't: revealing the truth behind politicians' claims (this site, too, avoids the term "lying" to use more neutral words like "flubs" or "false claims"). Media Matters investigates conservative "misinformation" spread by the media.

I want to live in a country of truth rather than truthiness, of intellect rather than instinct. As this campaign season progresses, I'm increasingly worried that truthiness is winning the battle.

Update: WaPo covers this same topic. The article notes that "Fed up, the Obama campaign broke a taboo on Monday and used the "L-word" of politics to say that the McCain campaign was lying about the Bridge to Nowhere."