| I suppose I ought to elaborate. You are acquainted with the juridical idea of "innocence until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt". I am not even asking for that, but clearly, the worse the allegation, the more careful one ought to be to have proof enough to sustain it, and even more clearly, loyalty means nothing if you are not prepared to give the benefit of the doubt to your own friends. I was not talking about policy disputes, I was talking about believing the worst of one's country or its representatives, without being compelled to by the state of the evidence. For example, those people who believe that because some abuse of prisoners occurred, it is pervasive, which is a non sequitur; those people who believe that the President lied about WMDs, when nothing of the sort has been proven; and those people who have so little faith in our institutions that they think a cabal of upper middle ranking bureaucrats have hijacked US foreign policy. Any of these things MIGHT be true, but there is not even preponderating evidence to support any of them. Nevertheless, some people assert them as simple fact........ |
