The truth shall set you free
Leonard Fein’s column in The Forward today caught my attention, not because of its substantive focus (the Clinton campaign’s ridiculous attempts to excuse Hillary Clinton’s fictional account of her Bosnia excursion as “misspeaking” or “mistaken remembrance”) but because of its opening paragraph:
Harvard’s motto is “Veritas” — truth. The motto of Brandeis is “Truth Unto Its Innermost Parts”; Yale’s is “Lux et Veritas,” light and truth (and the same for the University of Indiana); and Johns Hopkins goes with “Veritas Vos Liberabit,” the truth shall make you free.
When I was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins, noted alumnus Russell Baker (’47) gave a speech on the theme of the University’s motto. He began, as I recall, by contrasting the Hopkins motto with those of Harvard, Brandeis & Yale. While Harvard, Brandeis & Yale cite truth for its own sake, Hopkins emphasizes the instrumental value of truth. He then pointed out that the JHU motto was not necessarily true. For example, he noted, in the case of a felon, the truth might get him fifteen to twenty years in prison, while, in the case of an unfaithful husband, the truth might set him a good deal freer than he cared to be.
Of course, even Russell Baker couldn’t have anticipated the Clintons.
Filed under: The Groves of Academe | Tagged: academia, debris, election 2008
I’ve never been so in need of sleep, that I claimed to have been in a war situation.
I talked about this with a psychiatrist. It has to ego and vanity. Hillary has that much of a sense of entitlement.
Yeah, the “it was 11:00 and she was really tired” excuse — apart from being demonstrably false — is just pathetic. As I read somewhere else, if she’s that tired at 11:00 pm, what’s she gonna be like when the red phone rings at 3:00 am?
If the phone rings at 3AM, the nation wants a fellow like me there to answer it. I’ve made a project of locating and rating all the 24 hr. delicatessens in the United States of America. I have a socialized snack plan, which can easily be expanded in times of national emergency, and which can accommodate even a degenerate fabulist like Senator Clinton (provided she’s not too fussy).