Mr. Bush was asserting, as he had with his campaign schedule over the previous four weeks, that his potent appeal to voters would enable him to compete in, and possibly win, states where the odds should be against him.
Instead, they are asserted as valid because the holder believes them.
Every departure from what has been asserted as "proper" and "fitting" from that very specific standpoint is dismissed as aberrant, and is ridiculed and subordinated.
There ends up being no real way to reliably know whether what is asserted as a well-known fact is really a much retold fiction.
It's worse, because the very diversity of the elite is asserted as justification for the non-discriminatory nature of capitalism.
But still, there is something about Puddleglum's answer that represents a noble suspicion of what is asserted as established and uncontestable reality by intellectual elites.
"While Biden has been a strong voice on foreign policy, it has never been asserted, as it was about Cheney, that he was trying to advance his own agenda.
The personal is political and vice versa, and the rape of one woman is asserted as a globally sickening event – a poke in the eye for anyone who ever said female writers are more at home in the domestic sphere.
The basic subject of the constrained filmmakers of Iran and China and elsewhere is the demand, the need of the individual to be asserted, as such, against the coercion of authority; but discussions such as the ones that anti-smoking activists provoke are good reminders that, even here, these demands and needs are often under pressure.
