To answer the question I posed yesterday about why William Kristol and others were criticizing Glenn Beck for offering conspiratorial rants about connections between radical Islamists and American liberals given that they pretty much do the same thing, I’m going to draw on an old quote from Irving Kristol:
There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn’t work.
This makes sense as an explanation for Kristol’s own involvement in alleging the Justice Department was filled with terrorist sympathizers, and why he’s objecting to Beck’s rants about Egypt now. The latter was an “appropriate truth” in the sense that it gave conservatives another reason to hate Obama. Beck’s rants don’t represent an “appropriate truth” because they interfere with Kristol’s preferred outcome in Egypt. It’s not so much that Beck is lying, it’s that he’s not lying when and how Kristol would like him to.
