{"id":13718,"date":"2016-08-17T07:27:29","date_gmt":"2016-08-17T13:27:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=13718"},"modified":"2016-08-17T09:32:40","modified_gmt":"2016-08-17T15:32:40","slug":"pay-no-mind-words-no-longer-matter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2016\/08\/pay-no-mind-words-no-longer-matter\/","title":{"rendered":"Pay no mind; words no longer matter"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"DC\"<\/a>

David Crisp<\/p><\/div>\n

A spokesman for Donald Trump\u2019s presidential campaign defended his statement on Monday that Hillary Clinton \u201clacks the mental and physical stamina to take on ISIS\u201d by saying that Trump was referring to policy differences.<\/p>\n

\u201cMental and physical stamina\u201d is a synonym for \u201cpolicy\u201d? OK, I thought: It is official. Words no longer mean anything at all.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s kind of a relief. All those years I spent double checking quotes for accuracy; all those years I tried to tell students the difference between \u201cless\u201d and \u201cfew\u201d and \u201clie\u201d and \u201clay\u201d and \u201cits\u201d and \u201cit\u2019s\u201d; all those years fiddling with sentences to get the words to come out right; all are laid to rest.<\/p>\n

Humpty Dumpty has triumphed: Words now mean exactly what we choose them to mean\u2014neither more nor less.<\/p>\n

I guess that\u2019s what pundits mean when they say Trump is running an unconventional campaign. He and Clinton both get low marks from the public for honesty, but Clinton\u2019s lies are in the traditional mold, pretty much like the lies you tell. She lies to cover up misdeeds or to push an agenda, the sort of thing every president<\/a> since (and possibly including<\/a>) George Washington has done.<\/p>\n

Russell Baker once said that the job of a reporter is to listen to important people tell lies. Just look up Webster\u2019s definition of diplomacy: \u201cofficial lies told politely.\u201d OK, that definition is itself a lie. So sue me.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>Trump lies for sport or the thrill of it, like an inexperienced skier shooting down a double black diamond slope just to feel the rush before the crash. He overwhelms the system; as the Washington Post\u2019s fact-checking arm<\/a> notes, \u201cThere\u2019s never been a presidential candidate like Donald Trump \u2014 someone so cavalier about the facts and so unwilling to ever admit error, even in the face of overwhelming evidence.\u201d<\/p>\n

PolitiFact<\/a>, the Tampa Bay Times\u2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning fact checker, found that as of July 1, of the 158 factual claims by Trump that it had checked, 78 percent were mostly false or worse.<\/p>\n

When facts become obsolete, words soon follow. And who is to blame? Certainly not Trump, who doesn\u2019t seem to quite grasp the concept of either language<\/a> or reality. If words mattered,<\/a> he would not be the nominee of a major political party.<\/p>\n

The list of suspects is long. Talk radio<\/a> years ago abandoned the idea that words should be related to meaning. Every time Sean Hannity says, \u201cI\u2019ve got to be honest,\u201d something dishonest follows.<\/p>\n

Mainstream media, a popular culprit, gets a share of the blame for its nonsensical emphasis on writing \u201con the other hand\u201d stories, as if every issue split along equally valid claims.<\/p>\n

A perfect example appeared in Tuesday\u2019s Billings Gazette, in an Associated Press story<\/a> about America\u2019s contentious debate over global warming. The article quotes scientist Judith Curry as saying that she can no longer be considered for jobs in academia because of her skeptical stance on global warming.<\/p>\n

The clear implication is that partisans on both sides of the issue ostracize nonbelievers. But that is far from the facts. First, Curry does not dispute the basic science behind manmade global warming. She does dispute the public policy implications of global warming, and she does suggest that warming might not turn out to be as bad as some scientists think.<\/p>\n

Second, her work appears in peer-reviewed journals and has won awards. She has been profiled in Scientific American and hosts a popular blog<\/a> on climate science.<\/p>\n

Third, it\u2019s true that she has said<\/a> she probably would be unemployable if she were seeking another academic job. She used the subjunctive voice because she is a tenured professor in her 60s. Her theory about future employment is unlikely ever to be tested.<\/p>\n

To imply, even remotely, that the criticism she has received from other scientists is somehow comparable to Trump\u2019s repeated statements that global warming is a hoax<\/a> concocted by the Chinese is to engage in the falsest of equivalencies (is \u201cfalsest\u201d even a word? Yes, because I proclaim it so).<\/p>\n

But perhaps it\u2019s not the media that should be blamed for our meaning-free language. Perhaps it\u2019s the general degradation of American political discourse. Republican gubernatorial candidate Greg Gianforte recently sent cease-and-desist letters<\/a> to Montana TV stations asking them to quit running ads claiming that he was a New Jersey millionaire who had sued to block public access across his land.<\/p>\n

The ad, from the Good Jobs Montana Political Action Committee, was sort of true, but only sort of. Gianforte used to live in New Jersey; he now lives in Montana. He did file a lawsuit over public access, but he has argued persuasively<\/a> that he was seeking clarification over an easement, not to block access.<\/p>\n

Still, I thought, why complain? In the modern political world, the ad fell well within acceptable bounds of political discourse.<\/p>\n

But why are those bounds so low? Fortunately, I don\u2019t have to worry about that. Words no longer matter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A spokesman for Donald Trump\u2019s presidential campaign defended his statement on Monday that Hillary Clinton \u201clacks the mental and physical stamina to take on ISIS\u201d by saying that Trump was referring to policy differences. \u201cMental and physical stamina\u201d is a synonym for \u201cpolicy\u201d? OK, I thought: It is official. Words no longer mean anything at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":13405,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3864],"tags":[2853,335,1428,4844],"class_list":["post-13718","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","tag-donald-trump","tag-greg-gianforte","tag-hillary-clinton","tag-judith-curry","prominence-category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13718"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13718\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}