There exist a wealth of images that can be used to paint a
situation in which things were going well for someone, and then stopped. He
tries in vain to get more of what he used to have, and we think of him as having
lost his touch. If he keeps trying to duplicate his past achievements, we say
he is scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to peel off something from
there.
In fact something like this happens to professional pundits
who get paid to blabber opinions that may be worth something, or more likely
opinions that may be worth nothing. Still, the pundits keep blabbering about
things they know very little, and things about which they know nothing. When
all of what's there to say in a debate has been exhausted, and another debate
has not yet started, those pundits – hungry as they are for a paycheck – do the
equivalent of scraping the bottom of the barrel. A more appropriate analogy
would be that of salvaging a mine's tailings pond.
To understand the significance of this part, it is necessary
to know that some pundits have no ability to come up with original ideas. They
are literary parasites condemned to live off the works of other writers. Some
are brazen plagiarists and when they are caught, people stay away from them.
Other plagiarists are more subtle in that they steal ideas from colleagues but
rephrase them to sound differently, and nothing like a plagiarized piece. We
call this kind of operation 'literary mining'.
This takes us to the actual mining of base and precious
metals where we find a likeness between what happens when a mine is exhausted,
and what happens to a debate whose points have been argued to exhaustion.
In a real mine, the ore is crushed to separate the scraps of
metal from the rock in which they are embedded. The resulting heap is washed by
a flood of water and channeled to various stages where the metal is separated
from the impurities, and sent to the kiln where they are melted and turned into
ingots. Now the question: What happens to the flood of water?
That water is now sludge and has a name; it is called the
tailings of the operation. Because it is impossible to purify something to the
100 percent level, some metal remains in the sludge. Mining companies have a
pond dug up to take in and store the tailings. The pond never fills up because
the ground absorbs the water leaving the impurities laced with the metal in the
pond. When a gold mine has been exploited to exhaustion, the mining company
sells the tailings to a poorer company specialized in recovering the gold
scraps from the pond, thus generating a small cash flow that keeps it in
business till it hits better times.
That's also what happens in the mining of ideas generated
during a debate that was parlayed to exhaustion. The difference is that the
recovered gold is as good as the original metal whereas the recycled ideas are
usually of little value. You can see an example of this in the column that came
under the title: “Trump's art of the nuclear deals,” written by Clifford D. May
and published on May 15, 2018 in The Washington Times.
You'll not find a single idea in that column that wasn't
expressed previously and debunked when shown to exist for no purpose except to
spread falsehoods. What follows is a compilation of May's egregious falsehoods;
the kind of ideas you'll only find in a pond of slimy sludge:
“Those who rule North Korea
and Iran have always
harbored hostile intentions toward America and its allies. In Syria more than half a million have been killed
due largely to Iran 's
support of Mr. Assad's war on his Sunni subjects. Mr. Obama concluded a deal
that has given Iran
more than $100 billion. The atomic archive retrieved by Israel 's
Mossad. Mr. Trump's rhetoric and sanctions have caused Kim Jong-un to ponder...
These regimes [intend to] acquire the capabilities needed to mass murder
Americans at a time of their choosing”.
But the truth is out there for the whole world to see.
Except for the Soviet Union that went into Afghanistan on the invitation of its
government, for India that went into East Pakistan and pulled out when it
accomplished a mission called for by its Bangladeshi population, no one has
attacked or occupied another country for a period of time since World War II
but America, Israel and Saddam Hussein when he was America's ally.