Book Excerpt: The Assault on Reason By Al Gore

[Rose Siding]

Not long before our nation launched the invasion of Iraq, our longest-serving Senator, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, stood on the Senate floor and said: "This chamber is, for the most part, silent—ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing. We stand passively mute in the United States Senate."

Why was the Senate silent?

In describing the empty chamber the way he did, Byrd invited a specific version of the same general question millions of us have been asking: "Why do reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions?" The persistent and sustained reliance on falsehoods as the basis of policy, even in the face of massive and well-understood evidence to the contrary, seems to many Americans to have reached levels that were previously unimaginable.

A large and growing number of Americans are asking out loud: "What has happened to our country?" People are trying to figure out what has gone wrong in our democracy, and how we can fix it.

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http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1622015,00.html

[Sapere aude]

1. Yesterday I talked to our IT guy who use to be a profitable real estate broker and mortgage broker.

He was telling me that this is the best economy we have ever had. He rattled off figures like the unemployment rate and others. He is a right winger who has no conscience about sticking it to someone to make a buck.

Here is a guy that use to have lots of income and now makes less than half of that because the housing market went in the toilet. Yet he will not admit that things are not good economically because it would go against his ideology.

I told him that the measures of the economy he spouts are not kept the same way. That people who run out of unemployment are no longer counted as unemployed. That working class people say they are not better off economically than they were in the 90's. That jobs do not pay as much as they once did. But none of this means anything to him because of his faith in his ideology.

[BOSSHOG]

3. I always like to use a classic limbaugh line

he used back in the 90's when there were daily reports of the booming economy. "The President has no effect on the economy."

[KoKo]

2. K&R!