Republican Scholarship

ATR is offerning an exhaustive parsing of Peter Beinart's lies overstatements on WMDs in his interview with Kevin Drum. Go check it out [1], it's definitely worth the read.

But this brand of fact-checking is a hallmark of the modern Republican ideologue. Rather than testing a hypothesis, they begin from an unwavering opinion and then cherrypick the information supporting it while discounting evidence to the contrary - regardless of how preponderant it may be.

At best this is simply poor scholarship, at worst it is a concerted revisioning of a means vs. ends argument; the very revisioning that totalitarian regimes have always espounded.

It reminds me of that quote by Hannah Arendt, "Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines, totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself."