BEYOND THE RULE OF REASON

Here is Andrew McCarthy on the Obama Administration's denial of any wrong-doing or cover-up (the buck always stops somewhere else with Obama and his friends) on Benghazi:

The desultory vice-presidential debate underscored that, even if there were not a thousand other reasons for denying President Obama a second term, the Libya scandal alone would be reason enough to remove him.

By the time the ineffable Joe Biden took center stage Thursday night, Obama operatives had already erected a façade of mendacity around the jihadist murder of our ambassador to Libya and three other U.S. officials. The vice president promptly exploited the debate forum to trumpet a bald-faced lie: He denied the administration’s well-established refusal to provide adequate security for the diplomatic team. Just as outrageously, he insisted that the intelligence community, not the election-minded White House, was the source of the specious claim that an obscure, unwatched video about Islam’s prophet — a video whose top global publicists are Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton — spontaneously sparked the Benghazi massacre.

Our emissaries in Libya understood that they were profoundly threatened. They communicated fears for their lives to Washington, pleading for additional protection. That is established fact. Yet Biden maintained that it was untrue: “We weren’t told they wanted more security again. We did not know they wanted more security again.”

Shameful: so much so that even Jay Carney, no small-time Libya propagandist himself, would feel compelled to walk Biden’s denial back the next morning. But the vice president was far from done. His assertion that “the intelligence community told us” that protests over the video had sparked the murders of our officials was breathtaking, even by Biden standards.

Nevermind that Obama had better things to do than keep up with national intelligence or security; or that he had no time to meet with Israel's Netanyahu, because he was too busy being "eye candy" on The View.

When it comes to the fact that Islamic fanatics want to kill Americans and destroy our way of life, Obama simply puts his hands over his ears and refuses to listen. He killed Bin Laden all by himself, don't you know? And that ends the discussion.

Let's admit that reality can be a bit ambiguous and that there can be as many interpretations of it as there are people on earth. But, as Gagdad Bob points out, that fact

should not be taken as an excuse to believe that all interpretations are of equal value. Nevertheless, this latter belief is the hateway drug into the various pneumapathologies of the left, e.g., multiculturalism, moral relativism, the "living Constitution," etc.

Again, if there is no objective way to arbitrate between competing versions of reality, then it comes down to a matter of raw power.

And, as Dr. Godwin suggests, this behavior is literally what makes hell on earth, "...for hell is anyplace that is beyond the rule of reason -where reason, quite simply, does not apply."

Obama is all about the rule of appearances. His administration has been slowly and inexorably leading this country to a place beyond the rule of reason.

And his Administrations preference for appearance over reality; relativism over truth; and style over substance derives from postmodern metaphysics, which holds that there is no objective reality and my version of it is as good as yours so nyah nyah nyah (stick tongue out to indicate the conversation is over).

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that describes existence, and it leads directly to Epistemology, which concerns itself with knowledge.

METAPHYSICS (What is existence?)----> EPISTEMOLOGY (How do we know it?)

The answers derived from these two branches of philosophy lead directly to several other key branches of philosophy, including Ethics (how should we behave?) and Politics (what degree of force is permissable?). So you can see that one's metaphysics is a crucial foundation to how one interprets the world and how one behaves in it.

For those of you who think all this philosophy business is too abstract and irrelevant to your life; you are very very wrong. Catastrophically wrong.

These ideas have everything to do with your life and how you live it. They are also the crux of why the world we live in seems to be more and more incomprehensible and insane.

When you begin with the belief that reality doesn't exist outside your own head, then, it is just a very short--and minor--leap to accepting that words don't matter and can change meaning on a whim; or that it doesn't matter how you behave; that everything is relative anyway, including truth and morality.

But, just because reality is ambiguous and sometimes difficult to determine; it hardly gives someone carte blanche to say that every interpretation is of equal value and should be treated as such. That way lies madness...and madness is exactly what we are dealing with in today's world.

You can deconstruct it however you want, but ideas matter. Reality matters.