Yet even as they obsess over Barack Obama and Bill Ayers -- just as the McCain campaign tells them to --the news media have all but ignored John McCain's close ties to Gordon Liddy. A Nexis search** finds fewer than 100 news reports that have mentioned McCain and Liddy this year.
The idea that truth is merely a social construct, that it's subjective, in other words, first appeared in academia as a corruption of post-modernism, but it’s taken root in our culture without our really realizing it or understanding its implications.[ ... ]
Although this kind of thinking, relativism and constructivism, started on the left, many conservatives now feel empowered by it, too, and some of them have embraced it with a vengeance on issues ranging from global warming and evolution to the war in Iraq.
We then try to explain to them why the outer shell color of people matters so much on this planet and why those individuals who can lay eggs (sorta) are regarded as second-class quality essentially everywhere while the egg-laying ability itself is lauded to high heavens. The aliens then roll all their eight eyeballs and decide to vacation on Alpha Centaur next time.
Not being "the other" has some great advantages. For instance, when John McCain or Joe Biden do something stupid they only affect their own reputations, because white men are not "the other". They are individuals. When Barack Obama or Sarah Palin do something stupid they affect the reputations of African-Americans or women respectively (at least among all racists and sexists). They serve as embodiments of the groups they represent. This is the case as long as Firsts are necessary, as long as we only have a handful of individuals on which to base our group assessments.
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