Their Own Facts

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Sounds like our own time, doesn’t it, rather than two centuries ago? The title of this post, of course, doesn’t come from A Tale of Two Cities but from Pat Moynihan’s famous wisecrack: “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.” Except today, of course, there’s such a deluge of information that everybody does, indeed, have their own facts.

That’s one of the things that leapt out at me when listening to the talking heads programs this morning in the commentary about the debt limit. The Republicans said that the House had produced the one and only proposal to raise the debt limit. That is true as far as it goes. The Democrats said

1. President Biden published his budget back in March
2. What good would it be for the Senate to produce its own bill? The House would just reject it anyway.

The first of those assertions is also true as far as it goes. The second is an opinion rather than a fact. The problem is that’s the way our system is supposed to work: the House passes a spending bill, the Senate proposes its spending bill, there’s a reconciliation process, the president signs the resulting compromise, and the spending bill becomes law. Pretty much Schoolhouse Rock.

Something else the Democrats have said which is true as far as it goes: McCarthy is in a weak position. What so far has remained unsaid: Schumer is in a weak position, too.

The debt limit isn’t the only subject on which everybody has their own facts. Yesterday a commenter lamented:

You can apply this statement to almost everything in the “news” today: Patriot missiles, Durham Report, FBI collusion with dems, COVID statistics, climate change predictions and fears, the circumstances surrounding the J6 protests and illegal surveillance by the FBI, Norstream sabotage, the 2020 & 2022 election malfeasance, the current debt ceiling Dem/Republican debate, for starters.

to which we might add the Battle of Bakhmut. Has Bakhmut fallen or not? It depends entirely on who you listen to and, echoing President Clinton, how the meaning of “fallen” falls.

I’ll go on the record with my opinion about each of these. Note that these are just opinions—I wouldn’t elevate them to the level of facts.

• I don’t think the Patriot missile has shone in Ukraine. I think it may have reduced the damage of some Russian attacks but a lot of Patriot missiles have been expended in the process and/or lost. And they’re expensive.
• There was no “smoking gun” in the Durham Report but it did support the claim that the FBI needs reform.
• The greatest likelihood is that Poland and Ukraine sabotaged the Nordstream pipeline, Seymour Hersch notwithstanding.
• I think that anthropogenic climate change is a risk but not an issue, i.e. it hasn’t already happened but it may. There is no workable solution that doesn’t involve fewer imports from China (and India), more nuclear power, and CCS.
• The breaching of the Capitol on January 6, 2020 was unacceptable. Some of the participants may have thought of it as an insurrection but most didn’t. Keeping it in the news has helped Democrats.
• “Ballot harvesting” is a problem; voting machines do not appear to be. Joe Biden was elected president in 2020. There was no “red wave” in 2022 because Republicans screwed up and Trump was a big part of that.

I want to close this post with one more thought. Josh Billings was right: “I honestly beleave it iz better tew know nothing than two know what ain’t so”. That was true 250 years ago and it’s just as true now. With the sheer volume of information not to mention large language model “artificial intelligence” and deepfakes telling true from false is harder than ever but that doesn’t make ideologically-based reasoning more effective or make discerning the truth less necessary.