A mind is a horrible thing to waste…
Funny how this works.
"Four years before he was hoisted to Speaker of the House, a smooth-faced Representative Paul Ryan declared, ‘If you ask me what the biggest problem in America is, I’m not going to tell you debt, deficits, statistics, economics—I’ll tell you it’s moral relativism.’”
All truth is relative, which means all doubt is reasonable.
Spoken like a true, uh, what’s the word, Rudy?
Oh, yeah.
Defendant.
Dear Lord. He can. Not. Stop. Digging!
For once it’s clear what he’s doing. It’s the same thing they’re all doing, trying to tear down the very concept of objective reality by suggesting there’s much that’s unknowable, subjective, impossible for people of differing views to agree on or see the same way. You hear it from the left, too, reality is a social construct, maaan. And in today’s politics it comes from Putin. Straight from Putin. The idea is to take the third of society that’s in the middle and make them throw up their hands in frustration and give up.
“But it’s like the tree falling in the forest. Did anybody hear it? I mean, how do we know what the truth is?” he questioned.
“One person says the Flynn conversation took place. The other person says the Flynn conversation didn’t take place. What’s the truth? You tell me you how you figure out the truth,” Guiliani said during an interview with Fox News on Monday evening.
“It either did or it didn’t,” Fox News Martha MacCallum shot back.
“But it’s like the tree falling in the forest. Did anybody hear it? I mean, how do we know what the truth is?” he questioned.
Who among those present at the Flynn conversation says it didn’t take place?
Again, big journo fail. Someone needs to ask Giuliani what good it does in a criminal trial to have a witness/defendant swear an oath to tell the truth during the proceedings. He is explicitly saying there is no such thing as perjury, because the person providing testimony can utter what he believes to be the truth, and if it contradicts all other known facts it doesn’t matter, the witness believes what they’re saying. Giuliani renders perjury moot as a charge, for all one has to do is say they believe what they testified. Even if a witness knew the facts demonstrating their testimony to be false Giuliani’s contention is truth is but a matter of belief and perception.
How the hell does the judicial system function using Giuliani’s definition of telling the truth?
Giuliani knows better, but perjury is not the natural outcome of “he said, she said.” To commit perjury, you have to be under oath, and intentionally tell a falsehood. That’s quite different than two people having different recollections of the same event.
No one is more truthful than Rudy.
Alternate headline:
“Why You Can’t Believe a Word Giuliani Says”.
Alexandra Petri offers a great primer on the solipsism that defines the GOP.
“All I know is the line between law and crime, between truth and untruth, between reality and fantasy — there is no line. They are infinitely fungible. Everything is real, or, perhaps, more simply, nothing is real. This is a belief system that the president and I share, although he is of course not real, merely a cruel joke concocted by my mind, like a dream metaphor that feels too on-the-nose.”
Last week, Giuliani also told Chris Cuomo that truth “is in the eye of the beholder”
And the War on Truth continues unabated. Strategists questioned the wisdom of opening a war on two fronts simultaneously. However, the anti-truth forces are holding their lines in both the executive and legislative branches. Meanwhile, reinforcements are on the way for the judicial branch, which thus far has not been seriously engaged. Observers contend that the crucial battle in the War on Truth will take place on November 6th.
How very Goebbelesque of him.
There’s a truth there somewhere. Someone is telling THE TRUTH. The other one is LYING.
“But it’s like the tree falling in the forest. Did anybody hear it? I mean, how do we know what the truth is?” he questioned."
I guess we have to ask the bear that was taking a convenient pit stop under that tree when it fell.
Actually, I believe Rudy is basically telling us that if you can get away with it, the truth is what you want it to be.