I'm still not clear on what the "truthiness" business is all about, but "getting at the truth" seems a more urgent undertaking.

Hence I was taken with the column in today's Boston Globe by Harvard Law Professor Charles Fried.

Fried writes:

There is such a thing as truth; that is why Holocaust deniers are foolsor liars. But that is exactly why there can be no such thing as officialtruth -- truth endorsed, policed, and enforced by the power of thestate. Truth is above politics, and judges politics, which is whypolitics has no authority to proclaim it.

"Power" and "authority:" Pilate and Jesus. Even if, in the short term, power prevails.