Pfarrer on the attack
I remember reading about this book when it first came out. It felt like all those tell-all exposes about the Clinton White House from former military aides who stopped by the White House to brief a staffer and somehow gained the insight that Clinton was a terrible commander-in-chief.
Pfarrer tried to be "fair" to Obama in his criticism, and there was some effort at not being an absolute hit job.
But to have a military spokesman come out and say, "This book is a lie. We don't usually comment, but... c'mon" that's pretty damning.
The article at the end notes several basic factual errors that are supposed to impugn the author's account of the raid. I guess they do.
But it reminds me of the flap over Bill O'Reilly's book about the Lincoln Assassination being yanked from the Ford's Theater bookshop because it is factually inaccurate. O'Reilly says it's because those meanies at the National Park Service don't like them. The NPS says, this book is chock full o'crap.
This returns me to the common theme of this blog. We live in a world where objective fact is denied as spin. We have effectively ceded rational decision making to a process of he said/she said and whoever can yell the loudest. We have abandoned the Enlightenment assumption of reason and rationality.
Jerry Sandusky goes on TV and says he's not a child rapist. Herman Cain says 9-9-9 will solve our budget problems. John Boehner - who is employed by the government - says the government has never created a job.
We are awash in a torrent of bullshit. And until we stop and call the bullshitters what they are, we are never going to solve any of the problems that we are facing.
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