Al Gore: The Assault on Reason

[fencesitter]

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1622015,00.html

From Time Magazine:

Book Excerpt: The Assault on Reason
Wednesday, May. 16, 2007 By AL GORE

Not long before our nation launched the invasion of Iraq, our longest-serving Senator, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, stood on the Senate floor and said: "This chamber is, for the most part, silent—ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing. We stand passively mute in the United States Senate."
Why was the Senate silent?

In describing the empty chamber the way he did, Byrd invited a specific version of the same general question millions of us have been asking: "Why do reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions?" The persistent and sustained reliance on falsehoods as the basis of policy, even in the face of massive and well-understood evidence to the contrary, seems to many Americans to have reached levels that were previously unimaginable.

A large and growing number of Americans are asking out loud: "What has happened to our country?" People are trying to figure out what has gone wrong in our democracy, and how we can fix it.

To take another example, for the first time in American history, the Executive Branch of our government has not only condoned but actively promoted the treatment of captives in wartime that clearly involves torture, thus overturning a prohibition established by General George Washington during the Revolutionary War.

******

American democracy is now in danger—not from any one set of ideas, but from unprecedented changes in the environment within which ideas either live and spread, or wither and die. I do not mean the physical environment; I mean what is called the public sphere, or the marketplace of ideas.

It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know I am not alone in feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong. In 2001, I had hoped it was an aberration when polls showed that three-quarters of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on Sept. 11. More than five years later, however, nearly half of the American public still believes Saddam was connected to the attack.

******

3 page article, much more!

[CC]

1. The Assault on Reason should be

required reading for every candidate, voter, high school student and college student. I talked one English teacher into including it into her course work and lost count of how many people I've loaned my copy to, specially those that lean to the right.

[lazyriver]

3. I've loaned my copy to six people so far.

I think it's Mr. Gore's finest book to date.

[AwakeAtLast]

5. I absolutely agree!

:kick:

:hi:

[yurbud]

6. problem is some benefit from assaulting reason

[AndyTiedye]

2. Very Much Kicked and Recommended

:kick::kick::kick:

[Uncle Joe]

4. I would highly advise anyone concerned about the direction of the nation to read this book.

Thank you for the thread, fencesitter.

Kicked and recommended.