Much Badiou about nothing

From a Monday post at Talking Points Memo:

[T]here’s one aspect of this story that seems to have attracted no editorial mention or public interest. Implicit in all the coverage is the assumption—by Democrats and Republicans alike—that the Attorney General is going up to Capitol Hill to lie. As far as I can tell, this is a universal assumption. The Republicans are rooting for Mr. Gonzales to be successful in his perjury, to tell a coherent story that his enemies cannot break down. The Democrats are rooting the other way, off course. They’re hoping that their ace interrogators will be able to shoot enough holes in Mr. Gonzales’ story that they can destroy his credibility. But nobody seems to find it shocking or tragic that the Attorney General of the United States is going to lie to congress. . . . I’m sure that if Gonzales makes it through his testimony without being totally discredited, Fred Barnes and Brit Hume will be all over Fox news boasting that the Senators “never laid a glove on him.” But no one seems the least bit concerned about his truthfulness, just his tactics. . . .

This seems largely true to me, but it doesn't take even a casual observer long to recall other examples of thoughtlessly accepted lying in the realm of politics. Useful, though, that this one is so obvious and so especially egregious--when the sitting defender of justice is expected to lie for political gain. Justice is concerned with nothing if not the truth, and there need be no better evidence for the politicization of the Justice Department than the fact that the Attorney General cannot tell the truth because of his own political machinations.

Alain Badiou, the contemporary French philosopher, would argue that any notion of politics that allows such baldfaced lying is sick. Badiou wants to align politics, justice and, most importantly, the truth, so that politics is always a "truth process"--a way of discovering and fighting for the core truth of a situation. He has something interesting to say about the emptiness of American politics:

The antinomy of truth and debate is a bad joke. Except, of course, if one deems it necessary to assert special rights for falsity and for lying. In this case, it would instead be necessary to say the following: debate, which confers rights without norms upon falsity and lying, constitutes the very essence of politics. But what Revault d’Allones calls ‘the courage of judgement’ is more like the laziness of those who are sheltered from every norm and see their errors or their lies protected by right (Metapolitics 14-5).

To put it simply, Badiou argues that a culture of political debate that protects liars and does nothing to condemn them (as evidenced by the crowing of Fox News commentators) is one in which political debate will never yield the truth. Watching the talking heads on the news, and this seems so right; they are not seeking the truth, they are seeking nothing, and they are surrounding it with hand-waving and yammering to keep all of us watching.