Rudy Giuliani Plus Truth Equals Five
Today we are all a bad meme.
Rudy Giuliani went on "Meet the Press" Sunday to have a little discussion of epistemology with Chuck Todd, and he wentway past postmodernism. Truth isn't merely socially constructed for this administration, it isn't even truth. Considering this administration started its first full day on the job with Kellyanne Conway heralding the age of "alternative facts," it only stands to reason the "president's" lawyer would insist "truth isn't truth." America has been stuck in Orwell Mode for quite a while now, only it turns out Big Brother is Billy Madison, and everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to any of this.
The two philosophes did their best to hammer the very life out of Socratic dialogue in a discussion of why Donald Trump still hasn't sat down for an interview with special counsel Robert Mueller. Obviously, it's because if they rush into things, that would just be a big ol' perjury trap!
Giuliani: I'm not going to be rushed into having him testify so that he gets trapped into perjury. When you tell me that, you know, "He should testify because he's going to tell the truth and he shouldn't worry," well that's so silly because it's somebody's version of the truth. Not the truth. He didn't have a conversation about --
Todd: Truth is truth. I don't mean to --
Giuliani: No, it isn't truth. Truth isn't truth! The President of the United States says, "I didn't -- "
Todd: Truth isn't truth? Mr. Mayor, do you realize what -- I, I, I --
Giuliani: No, no, no --
Todd: This going to become a bad meme.
Giuliani: Don't dothis to me (mimicking Todd facepalming)
Todd: Don't do "Truth isn't truth" to me!
Giuliani went on to explain that no one can ever know what TRVTH is, even, because just look how sometimes two people remember things differently , ergo truth is utterly unknowable, which makes presidential perjury unpossible, you fools, UNPOSSIBLE!
Donald Trump says, 'I didn't talk about Flynn with Comey.' Comey says, 'You did talk about it.' So tell me what the truth is [...]
They have two pieces of evidence, Trump says I didn't tell them and the other guy says that he did say it, which is the truth? Maybe you know because you're a genius.
Oh, gosh, two people say different things sometimes? Guess we'd better toss out the entire legal system, because who can ever know? Obviously, said Guiliani, we have to fire Mueller, who's Comey's best friend, and we can't trust any of the FBI people who make notes on Comey telling them about the conversation at the time, because they all work for the FBI and are therefore liars who are out to get Trump, too. Giuliani later took to the Twitters to explain he wasn't either being philosophical, he was simply saying if two witnesses disagree, you can't believe either, so there:
My statement was not meant as a pontification on moral theology but one referring to the situation where two people… https: //t.co/rHzVcO0QgK
— Rudy Giuliani (@Rudy Giuliani) 1534765729.0
Also LOL, "moral theology."
On Fox Business this morning, Trump's pro bono television lawyer Alan Dershowitz took his own shot at 'splainering what Giuliani meant (but did not say):
Giuliani was simply "inartful," but it's the same point: If Comey gave a different answer, then no defense attorney would let their client testify they never had such a conversation. even if the client believes it's a truthful statement, because the attorney knows another witness would contradict it. And that's the true meaning of perjury trap, Charlie Brown.
Politico helpfully notes Giuliani has been full postmodernist on this matter for some time. Perhaps because when a party spends 30 years with its evangelical base insisting there are eternal, unquestionable Truths that drive them to insist math has to get rid of "X" because no value can ever be variable, the urge to be a hypocrite is irresistible.
Last week on CNN, he rejected Chris Cuomo's assertion that "facts are not in the eye of the beholder."
"Yes, they are," Giuliani said. "Nowadays they are."
In May, the former New York mayor pursued a similar line of thought in an interview with The Washington Post about the Mueller investigation: "They may have a different version of the truth than we do."
Also, after the latest round of tell-all books, Team Trump is wishing very fondly for the Death of the Author, so there's that.
Yr Wonkette welcomes the arrival of the phrase that will almost certainly become shorthand to define the Trump Years, as surely as Nixon was summed up by "I am not a crook" or Rick Perry by "Oops." Although of course this assumes no other whopper outshines it, which after less than two years, seems unlikely.
Yr Wonkette can now report that instead of letting Mueller interview Donald Trump at all, the White House plans instead to simply screen Rashomon while Giuliani jumps up and down exclaiming, "See? SEE?!! That's what I'm talkin' about!"
[ NBC News / Fox Business / Politico ]
We don't even really get that. Occasionally a journalist will sputter out a rebuttal but since these clowns refuse to acknowledge it, the attempt at fact checking goes nowhere.
Journalistic integrity should demand hard stances. If your guest lies, call them out with the correct information. If they refuse to acknowledge it or continue to lie, end the interview and remove them from your show.
I had to look up Peterson. Found this from The Atlantic.
The pop-psych/self-help angle is a bit annoying. But he seems on to something.
But frankly, my own critique is more informed by Sokal.
I'm an unabashed Old Leftist who never quite understood how deconstruction was supposed to help the working class. And I'm a stodgy old scientist who believes, naively, that there exists an external world, that there exist objective truths about that world, and that my job is to discover some of them.
I'm a Fourth Internationalist myself, having read the "Manifesto" as an aspiring petty-bourgeois intellectual in while in HS in rural Delmarva. Deeply interested in "the Russian Question," I trained as an historian of Soviet industrialization, as the Union was destroyed by the IMF,
So while in the humanities, I share his believe in an external world, and that truths about it can be known. Having dabbled in classical antiquity, I am well aware of the epistemological problems, and am confident in the profession's techniques.
I'm not a big Chomsky fan (even after he dropped his usual abstentionism in face of Trump, calling the GOP an existential threat to humanity due to their climate policies), but I like this quote from Rationalwiki's piece on Sokal.
“ALL of this can be described literally in monosyllables, and it turns out to be truisms. On the other hand, you don’t get to be a respected intellectual by presenting truisms in monosyllables.”
Postmodernism, with its dense prose and arcane jargon, always struck me as more a signifier of an academic "cool kid" and substantially less than a progressive critique or strategy. One that could dis the presently existing working class and class politics, while still playing at radicalism.
Myself, proudly on the outs with the "in" crowd.
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