corrente

And wouldn't you know it—in a textbook case of WPS (Winger Projection Snydrome) the guy was French.

Karl Röve French? He must be an Alsatian... [rimshot]

No, no. Jaques Derrida:

Mr. Derrida was known as the father of deconstruction, the method of inquiry that asserted that all writing was full of confusion and contradiction, and that the author's intent could not overcome the inherent contradictions of language itself, robbing texts - whether literature, history or philosophy - of truthfulness, absolute meaning and permanence. The concept was eventually applied to the whole gamut of arts and social sciences, including linguistics, anthropology, political science, even architecture.
(via the liveliest section in The World's Greatest Newspaper (not!): the obituaries)

The fit with the Bush campaign is exact, isn't it? Truth isn't even relevant to these guys. They just make shit up, throw it, and if it sticks, so much the better. Bush's "I'm not a lumberjack, and I'm OK, and you're not" lie (back) being just the latest example of this.

The percipient Josh Marshall recognized the post-modern character of Republican campaign rhetoric long about, back in 2003:

His style of deception is also unique. When Reagan said he didn't trade arms for hostages, or Clinton insisted he didn't have sex with "that woman," the falsity of the claims was readily provable--by an Oliver North memo or a stained blue dress. Bush and his administration, however, specialize in a particular form of deception: The confidently expressed, but currently undisprovable assertion. In his State of the Union address last January, the president claimed that Saddam Hussein had ties to al Qaeda and a robust nuclear weapons program, and that therefore we needed to invade Iraq. Even at the time, many military and intelligence experts said that the president's assertions probably weren't true and were based on at best fragmentary evidence. But there was no way to know for sure unless we did what Bush wanted.

The president and his aides don't speak untruths because they are necessarily people of bad character. They do so because their politics and policies demand it. As astute observers such as National Journal's Jonathan Rauch have recently noted, George W. Bush campaigned as a moderate, but has governed with the most radical agenda of any president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Indeed, the aim of most of Bush's policies has been to overturn what FDR created three generations ago.

Yet this is not an agenda that the bulk of the American electorate ever endorsed. Indeed, poll after poll suggest that Bush's policy agenda is not particularly popular. What the public wants is its problems solved.

Everyone is compromised by bias, agendas, and ideology. But at the heart of the revisionist mindset is the belief that there is really nothing more than that. Ideology isn't just the prism through which we see world, or a pervasive tilt in the way a person understands a given set of facts. Ideology is really all there is. For an administration that has been awfully hard on the French, that mindset is...well, rather French. They are like deconstructionists and post-modernists who say that everything is political or that everything is ideology. That mindset makes it easy to ignore the facts or brush them aside because "the facts" aren't really facts, at least not as most of us understand them. If they come from people who don't agree with you, they're just the other side's argument dressed up in a mantle of facticity. And if that's all the facts are, it's really not so difficult to go out and find a new set of them.

Which is why the wingers have such a hard time facing, and defeating, people who use the edged weapons of the Enlightenment: "evidence" and "reasoning."

David Sedaris, in Me Talk Pretty One Day, says that there are two kinds of French: Hard French, and Easy French. With Hard French, you have to do hard work: Learn the grammar, learn the vocabulary, and practice, practice, practice. But some people find that a challenge. For them, there's Easy French—just talk English, but louder. Which kind of French do the wingers use, I wonder?