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To: conservatism_IS_compassion
Would you go around quoting Dan Rather or Walter Cronkite?

No more than I would quote any media hack, Limbaugh included.

You begin to see the light!!!

1,300 posted on 08/25/2007 6:00:16 PM PDT by humblegunner (Me wise magic)
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To: humblegunner
Would you go around quoting Dan Rather or Walter Cronkite?
No more than I would quote any media hack, Limbaugh included.

You begin to see the light!!!

You place yourself on a plane above all the "hacks." It is well to aspire to superior analysis of facts and logic - but IMHO arguing from the assumption of one's own superiority is precisely what is wrong with "liberalism"/"objective journalism." Indeed, the word "sophistry" derives from the Greek word for "wisdom," and it is a negative word precisely because the Sophists argued from the assumption that they were wise and their adversaries were not wise (which naturally annoyed their adversaries).

Theodore Roosevelt's "Man in the Arena" speech is IMHO opposite:

There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes to second achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life's realities - all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their part painfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affection of contempt for the achievements of others, to hide from others and from themselves in their own weakness. The rôle is easy; there is none easier, save only the rôle of the man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds . . .

I do see a difference between Rush and the "objective journalists," and it is precisely that (although he jokingly makes mock-heroic bombastic declamations to the contrary) Rush does not argue from the assumption that he is right. He undertakes to cite facts and logic to prove that he is right. The difference between Rush and an "objective journalist" is that Rush if philosophical (philo = "love of", "soph = "wisdom") in approach, and the very claim of journalists to objectivity marks them as sophists.

1,302 posted on 08/26/2007 1:42:38 AM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion (The idea around which liberalism coheres is that NOTHING actually matters except PR.)
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