We stopped being okay over a decade ago. In 1998, the country’s president repeatedly lied under oath in front of the American people.
As George Will correctly asserted in January 2001: “There is no reasonable doubt that he committed and suborned perjury, tampered with witnesses and otherwise obstructed justice.”
Additionally, credible allegations surfaced that, as Will noted, made it “reasonable to believe that he was a rapist 15 years before becoming president.”
The failure of the United States Senate to remove Bill Clinton from office was a landmark defeat for the rule of law. Clinton himself didn’t merely survive impeachment; he has since thrived not in spite of it, but arguably because of it.
From that point forward, those whose stated agenda is to undermine this country’s essence knew that if they could only achieve sufficient power, they could probably get away with just about anything.
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More related than you know:
The problem ultimately lies in a misconstrued metaphysics, or rather in the absence of any notion of ontology at all. When Bill Clinton was asked whether he had sexual relations with a White House intern and famously replied that this depended on the meaning of “is,” his statement was of course evasive and facetious.
But it was also intelligent: For apart from the time-indexed meaning of the copula in the present tense, the “is” in “This is a ball” is different from that in “A ball is a spherical object.” The first sentence identifies a particular (or token) as a member of a class (or type), whereas the second offers a definition through the synonymy of types. The “is” in “it’s like” is neither of these, for it seeks to define a type — for example, “a ball” or “market segmentation” — by reference to a token. It does not even modify the definiendum directly.
There is a curious reluctance to think about the nature of things, maybe as a result of decades of teaching that there is no such nature apart from what one wants them to be.
Except for this part:
In most cases, what we say no longer matters much, for words have become cheapened. Qui perd sa langue, perd son âme aussi — “who loses one’s language also loses one’s soul,” the French say. And the Québecois have added: Qui perd sa langue, perd sa foi — “who loses one’s language also loses one’s faith.”
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Bwa ha! Language is the “faith” of Quebeckers, and has been since the 1970s. They wanted it that way.
The Catholic Church of Quebec sounds like it was pretty crappy, but is idolatry an improvement?
Institutionalized gangster government, indeed. “Nice country ya got there…”
