Just the Facts, Ma’am

Reading the pieces from the Commonweal symposium on the election that I linked to yesterday, I was struck more than anything by the fact that partisans on each side can disagree so sharply not just about values or policies, but about the facts themselves.

Here’s how Thomas Higgins, who’s voting for Kerry, describes the Iraq situation:

The majority of military and diplomatic professionals in government had grave concerns about the wisdom of going into Iraq with such flawed assumptions and poor planning. Now we are left to cope with the bitter fruit of the ideologues’ arrogance: the worst foreign-policy disaster for the United States in thirty years. It seems wholly irrational to return to office an administration that has failed so thoroughly the test of national security.

By contrast, Robert Royal, who supports Bush, says this:

My son-in-law is a Marine lieutenant in Fallujah and his e-mails to me … express disgust with domestic media coverage of the Iraq conflict, which he thinks is going far better than most Americans realize. I hope this is right. But I cannot say that I think the administration has done a first-rate job in managing the postwar situation. I supported and still support the decision to go into Iraq. … But it does not take much insight to see that the administration has occasionally let the tiller slip and has had to fumble to get a grip again. A Kerry administration would be far worse, disastrous in fact, but I expected more steadiness from this White House.

“Occasionally let[ting] the tiller slip” is a far cry from “the worst foreign-policy disaster for the United States in thirty years”! Who’s right here? Like most Americans, I only know what I read in the papers, which leaves the impression of a worsening insurgency with occasional signs of hope. But the fact that people with access to the same information can form such wildly diverging impressions about the state of affairs makes one think we’re not just divided, but inhabiting alternate realities.