Lysenkoism on the March

Among the most infuriating things about the current administration and its penumbra of supporters, allies, and kindred spirits is their contempt for facts and logic. Or, more specifically, it is their willingness to subordinate facts and logic to their political commitments. Ellen Goodman's on it in today's WaPo.

Most on the right can't deny that this is going on with a straight face anymore, so they generally revert to the "everybody does it" defense. That's probably not true, but it probably is true to that the vast majority of politicians do it to some degree or other. But don't fall for this transparently fallacious reply. The point is that this administration and their pals do it more often, more shamelessly, and with greater commitment than any other administration. Differences of degree matter, and great differences of degree matter greatly. Nobody's perfect, but that doesn't mean that everybody's equal.

The administration's supporters might try to deny that differences of degree ever matter, I suppose, but that would be crazy. And they'd then have to, among other things, abandon their outrage about Amnesty International's "gulag" characterization. If mistreatment is mistreatment and differences of degree don't matter, then there's nothing wrong with calling Guantanamo Bay a gulag. (Incidentally, it isn't a gulag.) Consistency, however, is a hobgoblin of honest minds and not something that plagues the current crew in power.