Turns out that Presidential order I linked a few entries ago isn’t actually that big a deal.

Ech. Well, it was wrong of me to jump to a conclusion on that, but I think I get some slack, considering the things we know this administration has done already.

I have myself a blog-reading rotation, now, and I think my current favorite is Talking Points Memo by Josh Marshall. He takes a much more news-oriented approach than other blogs I read, which means it’s heavy on information and light on snark. I also like it because the posts tend to be quick, paragraph-length entries, with links to other parts of the TPM media empire if you want more info.

Over the weekend, he wrote an unusually long post about our country’s current experiment in training terrorists. In the middle of it was a paragraph that put into words a conflict that’s been in the back of my head for some time:

We’re so far deep into this mess that sometimes I believe we’re past the point of argument. You look at the evidence and you either see it or you don’t. Or perhaps more agnostically, you look at the evidence and one of two completely contradictory narratives makes sense. Whichever is right, the assumptions brought to the issue are so divergent as almost to defy argument or debate.

I occasionally lament that I don’t have a large enough forum to get important ideas out to people who really should be grasping them, but behind that is the quiet, diffuse despair Marshall is describing. For someone who prides himself on seeing other people’s points of view, and being able to construct a discussion that shows them mine, it’s disheartening to suspect that no amount of debate would change the minds that really need changing.