Dennis Miller in today’s Washington Examiner:
I guess I’ve been hearing it for years now as the country has slid into knee-jerk relativism. Till now though, it’s merely been an equivocating grandfather clock in the background, metronomic, at worst nettlesome. It was at the beginning of l’affaire Polanski, though, that I realized how much I’ve come to detest the word “but.”
One liberal pundit or another (banality = interchangeability) was bleating on and on, and I actually heard the words “what Roman Polanski did was wrong but …” and it hit me like an air horn in a Trappist monastery. With a simple wave of the conjunctive wand, we now believe that we can explain away absolutely anything!
I know man does not live by declarative sentences alone, although you can certainly do a lot worse than Hemingway. Purely and simply, there are certain times in life that you have to pull up short of the logic abyss that is the word “but” and pitch camp on the near side of it. This is one of those times.
To apply a caveat to the forcible rape of a 13-year-old girl by a 40-year-old euro-lech armed with quaaludes and bubbly (and ably assisted by a brain-dead parent) is akin to sailing around the Cape of Good Hope to visit the corner store.
Now while I’m pretty certain Whoopi Goldberg is going to try to put a Roadrunner cloud between herself and her “not a rape-rape” gem, I’m not even sure she has to anymore! I think our society is so inundated with misinformed faux wisdom these days that her swing and a miss moment has already passed. The dogs bark, the caravan/news cycle moves on.
And where do you most often find this contorted gibberish masquerading as insight? Invariably on the backside of the word “but.” Liberals have commandeered “but,” conservative bunko artists favor “nevertheless,” and moderates put you into an induced coma with their incessant “howevers.” Pick your poison, fact is we’d all be better off staying on this side of the “but.”
Read the full article here.