In Defense of Bullshit
I made a list of some aspects of bullshit that the author was overlooking. There’s the relativity of bullshit: a smitten poet explaining that her smile puts the sun to shame and her eyes outshine the starriest night speaks with utter sincerity to a maiden who, if she’s been once around the block, is thinking, “The same old bullshit.”
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And there’s the law. If there were no bullshit we wouldn’t be a nation ruled by law. We would be ruled instead by ideologies and passions. We would be at the mercy of our true believers. Supreme Court nominee John Roberts made our prevailing values pretty clear in last week’s confirmation hearing. When senators grilled him on forceful position papers he’d written for the Reagan Justice Department, Roberts reminded them he was serving a client. “As an advocate,” he said, “I’ve certainly been arguing deference to the legislature in appropriate cases. Other cases, of course, I was on a different side and arguing the opposite. . . . I’ve not only been in a position where I’ve been pressing arguments, for example, for the executive branch. I have been arguing cases against the executive branch . . .”
“I think I probably would have,” Roberts replied. He added, “I would have to look at the legal issues, and I have not and never have presented legal arguments that I thought were not reasonable arguments.”
Petrelis noted that David Maurstad, director of Region Eight, used to be lieutenant governor of Nebraska and, according to his resume, created a program “to recognize young people for their achievements and personal courage.” There’s no mention of a background in disaster response.
Petrelis linked his blog’s readers to newspaper articles and other cybersources that revealed Mayer’s past in bits and pieces. Other bloggers read Petrelis’s work and reposted it. One of them, known as Digby, added research of his own and posted a scornful thumbnail history. Mayer’s “a young Republican lawyer who graduated from law school in 1997 and worked on redistricting issues in Colorado in 2000,” he wrote. A year later the state’s Republican governor named him to a judicial-district nominating commission.
