When I linked to a 1999 Jonah Goldberg G-Spot in the post below as background on Mumia Abu Jamal, I was struck at how well it also served as background for another recent scandal:

I think the guy is guilty as sin. So, apparently, does Congressman Tom Delay because he is sponsoring a moment of silence on the floor of the House to protest the decision of Evergreen College in Washington to invite Mumia to give a commencement address by satellite from death row. The Washington Post’s Lloyd Grove asks, “Isn’t all this just a distraction from important stuff?”

The truth is this is really, really, really important. Mumia is simply the most visible symbol (not a person mind you, because the person shot a cop, but a symbol) of the Left’s ever-increasing disdain for facts that intrude on important “narratives.” In 1987, during the Tawana Brawley hoax, the Reverend Al Sharpton dismissed objections that he was a craven liar and con man by saying “we are trying to build a movement here.”

At Duke University a little over a year ago, a black doll bearing a sign that read “Duke Hasn’t Changed” was “lynched.” For about a week, this ugly “hate crime” was pinned on white racists. It turned out black students did it to hilight racism on campus. Similar “crimes” are increasingly frequent on college campuses. Gay groups fake gay-bashing incidents. Black groups write racist graffiti. (See NR 6/14/98, Jon Sanders piece).

Remember, we’re “building a movement” and calling “attention to serious problems in our society.” The mere fact that the evidence of the problem they are calling peoples’ attention to is very often a staged fraud is irrelevant. The Nazis knew that Communists were bad (and they were) so by this reasoning the torching of the Reichstag was justifiable because it called attention to the serious problem of Bolshevik infiltration in Germany.

I first noticed this in a book I reviewed a long time ago written by a national campus agitator named Paul Rogat Loeb. In his awful and silly book, Generations at the Crossroads, he dismisses the fact that a horrible racial assault at Emory was staged, because “other racial harassment has unquestionably occurred again and again on college campuses,” though he never lists any. He even goes further to say that people who suspected it was fraudulent were actually “abettors” of racism.

Flashforward to 2004, where this sort of thing continues. As Mark Steyn wrote in August:

My truth is that I am a gay American,'' announced Gov. James McGreevey to the people of New Jersey last Thursday.

That's such an exquisitely contemporary formulation: ''my'' truth. Once upon a time, there was only ''the'' truth. Now everyone gets his own -- or, as the governor put it, ''One has to look deeply into the mirror of one's soul and decide one's unique truth in the world.'' For Jim McGreevey, his truth is that he's a gay American; for others in the Garden State, the truth about McGreevey is that he's a corrupt sexual harasser who put his lover on the state payroll in a critical homeland security post, and whose I-am-what-I-am confessional is a tactical feint that distracts the media sob sisters from the fact that, as his final service to the Democratic Party, he's resigned in such a way as to deny the people an early vote on his successor.

We'll see whose truth prevails in the fullness of time.

Then there's Kerry's Christmas in Cambodia, which was seared--seared!--into his memory until it wasn't, and of course, Ra^thergate. To bring it all full circle, Lawrence Auster writes:

CBS, its media defenders and its fellow accusers of Bush are now employing the leftist logic used by the Nation in 1988 when Tawana Brawley’s charges against Steven Pagones were revealed as a total lie. The Nation ran an editorial in which it argued that even though Brawley’s charges were not actually true, they expressed the essential truth about today’s America (i.e., that America is a country in which white district attorneys kidnap and rape black girls and scrawl racist slogans on their skin and smear them with feces and leave them stuffed in garbage bags), and therefore were still legitimate. In the same way, we are now told (and we have to accept it on faith) that Bush really did misuse the system, and his superior officer really was upset with him, so the forged documents indicating those things happened really aren’t a big deal.

Hard to be postmodern when there are so many people to tell you that your truth is not the truth.