INSINCERITY IS the new theme of American politics. Americans used to be famous for openness -- they were naive, foreigners said, but absolutely straightforward.
During much of the last century, Ernest Hemingway and his "B.S. meter" were famous. Hemingway claimed an infallible ability to identify phonies, and his imaginary detector seemed as quintessentially American as his close-cropped, hard-hitting sentences. If Hemingway came back to Earth for an American holiday, his B.S. meter would be pegged permanently at maximum.
Here's an example of insincerity at work. It comes from the left, which seems to specialize nowadays in bitter, angry, nasty declarations that are phony right down to the ground.
Recently, Vice President Cheney and Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) disagreed. Rangel denounced Cheney, rudely. The VP denounced him back. Rangel's response: Cheney must apologize.
First, why should Cheney apologize and not Rangel? More important, note the ever more popular idea that politicians must apologize on cue like trained seals whenever a noisy enough group orders them to. Yet every 5-year-old knows that a coerced apology has got to be insincere. Otherwise it wouldn't need to be coerced.
Our willingness to traffic in such nonsense shows a dangerous tendency to disregard reasoning, logical context, the meaning of words. How else to understand the latest Bill Bennett story? It reads like science fiction -- live from the planet Bozo, a man whose enemies know by magic that he actually means the exact opposite of what he says.
A few weeks ago, Bennett said on his radio program that X is a stupid idea; then he said that if you believe X, you might as well believe Y. But Y is "impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible." One thing we know for sure: Bennett is against Y. He thinks that Y is "impossible," is "ridiculous," is "morally reprehensible." "Y" was the idea that aborting all black babies would cut the crime rate.
So the left jumped all over him. Bizarrely enough, the White House chimed in. (A Republican White House opening fire on Bennett is like the Joint Chiefs bombing their own front lines.) Yet no one who read or heard Bennett's actual statement in context could possibly have believed that Bennett is racist or had talked like a racist.
