"In remarks at Nelson Mandela's funeral, Obama makes it personal"

"Michelle and I are the beneficiaries of that struggle. But in America and South Africa, and countries around the globe, we cannot allow our progress to cloud the fact that our work is not done," he added, reminding the crowd that people still suffered under oppression." (bold mine)

"Over 30 years ago, while still a student, I learned of Mandela and the struggles in this land. It stirred something in me," Obama said. "It woke me up to my responsibilities - to others, and to myself - and set me on an improbable journey that finds me here today. "And while I will always fall short of Madiba's example, he makes me want to be a better man."

What is a "fact", as the term has come to be understood politically?

On the upcoming anniversary of a letter Niccolò Machiavelli wrote—"called the most celebrated in all Italian literature—to his friend Francesco Vettori announcing that he has just completed “a little work, On Principalities.” It later acquired the title The Prince, under which it became the most famous, and infamous, book on politics ever written"... a writer for the Weekly Standard attempts to briefly dissect its implications for us today.

The phrase “effectual truth” appears in Machiavelli’s writings only once—“to concentrate its power,” Mansfield says—and nowhere else in prior or contemporaneous Italian or Renaissance literature. It seems to be merely one of Machiavelli’s excuses for his immoral teaching: a prince must have recourse to the effectual truth of how men do live, as distinct from how they ought to live, so that he may learn how not to be good, lest he come to ruin among so many who are not good.

Difficulties in the text reveal a deeper meaning. Those who wish “to make a profession of good in all regards” are above all the ancient writers who “imagined republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in truth.” The effectual truth is not merely the truth that has an effect. It is the visible truth, the truth of sense perception, of concrete reality—the truth that displays itself. Here is the creation of the concept of “fact,” which is meaningless unless understood in opposition to what purports or aspires to be but is not fact: that which is merely supposed or hoped for or believed. Here also is the beginning of the break with ancient metaphysics and teleology that has, after centuries of working through the implications, left the West morally bereft. If what cannot be felt or seen cannot be real, how can it guide our actions? Attempts to find the answers through “science”—the latest being brain chemistry—only further radicalize the Machiavellian premise.

Washington Examiner, Weekly Standard and Andrew Sullivan via Althouse