Hell On Earth

Powerline has a piece on Mary Mapes’s Hell. It touches on one of my obsessions, the leftist mind. During the Bush memo story, in the days after the blogosphere proved the memos to be fake, I was stunned when Dan Rather and CBS simply ignored the facts and stood by their story. Never before had we seen such a naked display of evasion in the liberal media. I think it was a watershed moment for the media and the internet.

Rather’s producer on that story, Mary Mapes, refuses to this day to see reality. As a Powerline reader writes,

I was reading your latest Mapes post and was struck by the irony of the situation she has manufactured for herself -- anyone who buys her story (hence her only daily company of friends and followers) is a fool. And she is quite aware of that fact. It seems a special kind of hell on earth.

This argument reminds me of the Objectivist argument for the virtue of honesty. Conventional moralists make the mistake of holding honesty to be moral, but not practical. However, a liar has to go through life hoping that everyone he meets is too stupid to see through his lies. Honest people seek values in others; a dishonest man seeks the worst in others. What kind of life is it when one must depend on the worst in people to escape detection? Hell on earth.

If you want to be happy on this earth, there is nothing more practical than honesty.

Mary Mapes’s self-esteem is so wrapped up in her liberal bias that she cannot let herself see the facts of reality. She has created her own hell.