Tuesday, March 08, 2005
OBLIVIOUS TO THE FACTS
You should be terrified, writes the Sydney Morning Herald’s Alan Ramsey. Quoting Bill Moyers, he warns: The delusional is no longer marginal! Voters and politicians alike are oblivious to the facts! Ideologues hold stoutly to a world view despite reality!
Bill Moyers, the founding director of Public Affairs Television in Washington, retired three months ago, one of the United States’ most honoured journalists. Harvard Medical School that same month named him the recipient of its fourth annual Global Environmental Citizen Award. Moyers’s acceptance speech should terrify you. If not you deserve everything you get, even if the rest of us don’t. Here is an edited version.
"One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress. For the first time in our history ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington. Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven. Ideologues hold stoutly to a world view despite reality. When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.
"Remember James Watt, President Reagan’s first secretary of the interior? He was the man who told the US Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in the light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said: ‘After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.’ Washington elites snickered. The press corps didn’t know what he was talking about. But James Watt was serious.”
A small problem for Ramsey: Watt never said any such thing, as Powerline pointed out last month. Moyers subsequently apologised:
Bill Moyers has apologized to former U.S. Interior Secretary James Watt for referencing a quote, which has been wrongly attributed to Watt for years, during a speech Moyers gave last December upon receiving an award from Harvard Medical School. The text of the speech has since appeared in several newspapers and on numerous Web sites.
"I said I had made a mistake in quoting him without checking with him,” Moyers told E&P today. “I should have done my homework."
As should have the ideologue Ramsey, who’s been holding stoutly to a world view despite reality for some time. Why, it’s almost as though he’s delusional, or oblivious to the facts. Over to you, Media Watch; Ramsey deserves everything he gets.
(Via Attila The Pun and several readers)