An “assertion” is as good as the truth…

Lorie Byrd wrote an important piece yesterday, which I missed. We’ve been moving in this direction for a long time, but she is correct; we’ve finally gotten there: Any assertion, particularly if it’s made from the left, or by the press, is as good as the truth.

When assertion replaces truth, language no longer has definite meaning assigned to it, and civility becomes a thing of nostalgia, the table is set for a dysfunctional debate that not only fails to educate the public, but misleads and misinforms them continually. Just as those in the new media forced those at CBS to confront the truth of their fake documents, those interested in preserving truth in our political debate have many battles to fight in the days to come.

She’s on the same wavelength as John Leo in this piece:

Assertion doesn’t always beat facts, but it happens a lot. For example, many of President Bush’s detractors are saying that his argument for keeping troops in Iraq — to achieve a democratic transformation — is a new rationale meant to distract from the missing WMDs. The New York Times made that charge in an editorial on April 27. But it isn’t true. Bush listed democratic transformation in Iraq as one of his aims before the war, as the Times acknowledged in an editorial on Feb. 27, 2003. Distilling the president’s various arguments on Iraq down to the one on which a lot of people think they were snookered — the WMDs — is a distortion, but it accurately expresses a popular feeling, so who cares if it isn’t so? Not the Times, apparently.
[…]
With a big boost from the news media, assertion managed to topple Larry Summers at Harvard. Some reporting mangled Larry Summers’ controversial comments on women and science. A headline in The Washington Post magazine said, in part, “When Harvard’s president questioned the scientific aptitude of girls …” But Summers didn’t say that the best women couldn’t achieve at the level of the best men. He said that there are more males than females at the very top, “about five-to-one at the high end,” which is roughly what the research shows. The bell-shaped curve for the distribution of intelligence is flatter for males than for females; there are more very bright males at the top and more very dull males at the bottom.

Discussing this evidence is a no-no at Harvard, so Summers would have been driven out even if he had been understood and quoted correctly. But he was ousted by yet another fact-free assertion — that he had somehow demeaned women. He hadn’t, but the strategy of his detractors worked. Summers apologized and then quit for hurting some people’s feelings. That’s what happens when emotions are allowed to beat facts.

Yep. Emotionalism is a bad fuel that is increasingly running our world. It keeps us in denial about things, too.