Loose Ends

• Melissa McEwan at Shakesville on calling Mr. Santorum on his bigotry, hatred, and desire-to-relive-the 19th-century without calling him synonyms of "irrational."  Beause he is a bigoted hate-filled reactionary.  His sanity is a diagnostic issue.
• Jon Carroll, National Treasure, on, well, we can't tell you.

  When you get U.S. senators saying that the Patriot Act is being misused, you have a covert team in the White House operating under a secret legal theory, you have the government prepared to spy on all its citizens all the time, you have the beginnings of a not-very-good science fiction story.

• Ian Buruma in The Globe and Mail about the lying and demagoguery in politics and tribal truths:

  The first people to argue that all truth is relative, and that all information is a form of propaganda that reflects society’s power relations, were far removed from the world inhabited by Mr. Santorum and his supporters. Several decades ago, a number of European and U.S. intellectuals, often with a background in Marxism, developed a “postmodern” critique of the written word. We might think, they argued, that what we read in The New York Times or Le Monde is objectively true, but everything that appears there is, in fact, a disguised form of propaganda for bourgeois class interests.