Originally posted by MaxVel
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No, I believe it absolutely can be shown to be objectively true and keeping good company with a number of American historians hasn't dissuaded me of that belief. We simply haven't had anything like this in modern history - not the subversion of the DOJ, not the corruption of State Department, not the reliance on "acting" agency members or the gutting of career officials and staff, not the blackout of Pentagon accountability.
It may be an opinion as opposed to what we might call "plain fact" but it's certainly an objective opinion that actually draws its inference from an unprecedented set of facts.
The "Obama/IRS" thing is another point in favor of what I'm saying: people who bring it up simply didn't follow the story to where the facts led. The IRS, as we eventually discovered, was "targeting" progressive SuperPAC groups just as much as conservative ones. The facts out of that story led to an agency suddenly overwhelmed by the Citizens United decision struggling to find an expeditious way to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. Which brings me to your last point: most of these things aren't fundamentally opinions on the partisan divide. That's your framing but if there are such things as facts and if those facts make one opinion or inference more rational than another then it is not partisan to advocate for the rational inference. And the fact that the "partisan divide" keeps changing on this front, as right-leaning and conservative people like David Frum, Max Boot, and George Will get lumped into the same side as Warren or Obama or Bill Clinton should serve as a warning that just because people might make a thing partisan doesn't mean it fundamentally is that way.
In any case, the basic fact remains the same: this is a cynicism. It's no good to simply project partisanship onto an issue when the issue can be rationally resolved. In this case, Warren is telling a set of stories that can easily be understood to be parts of a consistent whole. If someone wants to do the same thing for a story Trump tells, they're free to assemble the pieces and see if they fit. But there is a truth and it's more important that people work for that truth than just looking at things as yet another partisan squabble.
--Sam
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