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George Will

George Will, Flip-flopper

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In the 2004 election, the very suggestion of having changed one’s mind warranted the charge of “flip-flopping.” That was singularly dumb. Changing one’s mind about bad policies is a good idea. We won’t see this, however, from the current POTUS. We’re seeing a lot of it from the 1st armored pundit brigade of 2003 [I’ll link to material later, when I find it]. Only a few of them have had the cobbles to admit having been disasterously wrong. We still think they ought to be punished–demotion seems fair enough. Since we don’t have the power to demote, however, we can point and hoot. We can also study the brain-dead nonsense used to justify the behavior of an intellectually challenged man.

So, on that note, let’s look at the silly parsing of a slightly more hawkish George Will in March of 2003:

>It is a measure of *the intellectual vertigo* into which the United Nations has plunged “the international community” that America, which is going to war to enforce Resolution 1441, is said to be doing so “in defiance of the United Nations.” The war will be followed by a presidential election in which all candidates must answer this: “Do you believe that any use of U.S. military power lacks legitimacy unless approved by France, Russia and China?” The Republican candidate has already answered. [emphasis added]

That’s a dumb question. But let’s answer it anyway. The “legitimacy” never really was the issue, now was it. The real question–the one realized by France and Germany and all of the coalition of the unwilling–was whether the war *then* was justified for the reasons put forward by the administration. “Legitimacy” is a narrow and wrong interpretation of justification, in other words. Say it was “legitimate” in some narrow legal sense. This would have raised a second question: is it a good idea? Nope. It clearly wasn’t a good idea. For 3438 or so reasons.

David Brooks, George Will

Thanks for the plug George

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Despite his strident ad-homineming and strawmanning and general nonsequituring for the Bush/Cheney 04 ticket, George Will finally swallows a bitter draught of stupid ugly reality. He writes:

>Immediately after the London plot was disrupted, a “senior administration official,” insisting on anonymity for his or her splenetic words, denied the obvious, that Kerry had a point. The official told The Weekly Standard:

>”The idea that the jihadists would all be peaceful, warm, lovable, God-fearing people if it weren’t for U.S. policies strikes me as not a valid idea. [Democrats] do not have the understanding or the commitment to take on these forces. It’s like John Kerry. The law enforcement approach doesn’t work.”

>This farrago of caricature and non sequitur makes the administration seem eager to repel all but the delusional. But perhaps such rhetoric reflects the intellectual contortions required to sustain the illusion that the war in Iraq is central to the war on terrorism, and that the war, unlike “the law enforcement approach,” does “work.”

Maybe Mr.Will should should tell his colleague David Brooks, who lampooned Kerry’s claim that terrorism was a law-enforcement problem.

Charles Krauthammer, Op-Eds and other opinions, Paul Krugman

Punditry and reality II

Today Eric Alterman complains about our stupid political discourse. He’d be hard pressed to find more agreement here–our necks hurt from nodding.

The reasons for this stupidity are many. We touched on one of them briefly on Friday when we pointed out the confusion in the minds of many pundits between talking about reality–facts, for instance–and talking about talking about reality. To be fair, liberal pundits–excluding Krugman–tend to do too much of the latter. Right wing pundits, to their credit and our continual entertainment, do a lot of the former. And good for them. At least they know that arguments matter. It’s too bad they often get it wrong.

Charles Krauthammer

Punditry and reality

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When the opposition gives you advice, do the opposite of what he says. That ought to be a maxim. On that note, Charles Krauthammer, snarling and unapologetic hawk, has joined the chorus of those who have criticized the defeat of George Bush’s favorite Republican, Joe Lieberman, another unapologetic hawk. His argument goes like this: just as the peacenik democrats undermined their party in the Cold War after Vietnam, so it will happen again. Americans will not “trust a democrat with the presidency.”

For this crazy analogy to work–read here and here for substantial rebuttals–we must step outside reality and into punditry. Yes, reality and punditry are different.

The reality question–the one asked by Lamont, his supporters and much of the American people but ignored by Lieberman–is what we should do about the unmitigated disaster that is the war in Iraq.

The pundit question–the one Krauthammer asks–is whether our asking the reality question will cause us to be characterized by the political opposition as weak on terrorism.

They are two separate questions, however often they are conflated.

Here’s the rub: asking the pundit question in place of the reality question will not bring back the dead, it will not bring back American credibility, or strengthen our military, or help us win the war on terror. It will only bring more ugly reality, reality that just won’t go away, no matter how often we ignore it.

Op-Eds and other opinions, Plain Bad Arguments, Richard Cohen

Disappointing

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It’s difficult to have a discussion when your interlocutor constantly questions your motives. Motive questioning and motive analysis constitute too much commentary these days. Even someone we enjoy reading, the Daily Howler, frequently goes for the motive. It’s disappointing in his case because he has the solid analysis; he just doesn’t need to hypothesize about motives.

The most debilitating and potentially poisonous kind of motive-questioning is racism. Call someone a racist and no matter what the argument, it doesn’t matter; racists can’t make sound arguments.

In this vein, noted playwright David Mamet suggests that criticisms of Israel amount to anti-semitism:

>That the Western press consistently characterizes the Israeli actions as immoral is anti-Semitism. What state does not have the right to defend itself–it is the central tenet of statehood.

Rush Limbaugh couldn’t agree more. For him Jews who question Israel’s actions are self-hating Jews. Richard Cohen of the Washington Post has also argued this.

But it’s not the company he keeps that makes Mamet’s claim specious. In the first place, it’s false. Worse than that, he doesn’t provide any evidence for it. Second, a case can be made that, regardless of the justice of the cause, the means Israel have chosen are immoral. Of the myriad choices for responding to the kidnapping of the two soldiers (click here for some context), was it right that Israel chose invasion and bombing?

The question for Mamet, and for all of the others who make the anti-semitism claim, is whether the means in this case are justified. It should be obvious to anyone–even though sadly it is not–that questioning the means the State of Israel has chosen in this particular case does not amount to unjustified and global hatred of Jews.

Straw Man

A little analysis is a dangerous thing

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**Vacation is upon us, so this will be the last post until sometime after August 5th.**

That said, let’s have some fun with some academic style strawmanning. What’s that? Well, that’s when you are purposely obtuse in reconstructing someone’s argument. I found this, by the way, when I directed to the National Review Online. Kids, if you want to see grown persons reason like children, go there.

But this argument appears in First Things. Here goes. First, the author cites a comment on Bush’s stem cell veto:

>In vetoing the bill that would have funded stem-cell research, President Bush invoked what he termed a “conflict between science and ethics.” But what, exactly, is the “ethical” side of this conflict? … What the president describes neutrally as “ethics” is simply his own, sectarian religious belief. … [I]n what sense is it “ethical” for Mr. Bush—acting as president of the United States—to place his own sectarian, religious belief above the convictions of a majority of the American people and a substantial majority of both the House of Representatives and the Senate? In my judgment, this is no different from the president vetoing a law providing a subsidy to pork producers because eating pork offends his religious faith. Such a veto is an unethical and illegitimate usurpation of state authority designed to impose on all of society a particular religious faith.

That’s Geoffrey Stone, professor of law at the University of Chicago. Read the rest here. Before we look at the comment, it’s fairly obvious that Stone is puzzled over Bush’s assertion that there’s a conflict between science and ethics. Stone does not claim that no such conflict exists, he just wonders what *Bush* means by “ethics” in this particular circumstance. The burden is on Bush to specify, he made the claim. If he did so somewhere in his veto statement, then Stone ought to find out. But that’s not the claim of the commenter.

He writes:

>There are a different ways to make this argument work logically, and Stone doesn’t specify the one on which he relies. One version might look like this:

>(1) There can exist no purely rational basis for rejecting the federal financing of embryonic stem-cell research, and

>(2) Ethics is by its nature a rational process. Therefore,

>(3) When the president used the word ethics, he was either ignorant of the word’s meaning or disingenuous, since

>(4) Lacking any ethical—which is to say, rational—grounds for rejecting the federal funding of this research, the president must have been relying on nonrational motives. Perhaps not all nonrational motives are constitutionally impermissible for a public official, but

>(5) Religious motives are an explicitly prohibited form of nonrationality, and

>(6) President Bush is known to be a strong believer in a religion that rejects the destruction of embryos for scientific research, which leads to the reasonable inference that his particular nonrational motives were, in this case, at least “unethical and illegitimate,” and probably unconstitutional.

It’s obvious that Stone doesn’t assert (1), he puzzles over Bush’s “rational basis” as he has offered none (that Stone has noticed). But it only gets worse: (2) isn’t claimed at all, and then it just gets snide. What we have here is obtuse reconstruction. Sure it looks nice–all layed out analytic style with numbers–but in its pseudo rigor it completely misses Stone’s point.

Stone asks the President to assert a justification beyond simple assertion of his own particular religious ethical prejudice for his veto. The principle of charity would tell you that Stone isn’t asserting bald majority rule in ethics (and besides, he clearly isn’t). He is asserting that one’s own religious feelings *alone* do not constitute sufficient grounds for exercising legal force over a majority in democracy.

So, Stone is not arguing for the following:

>Either way, Stone’s argument demands that religious believers prove, far beyond any other public actors, that their public acts derive from rational motives—and when their actions match the result that their faith seems to require, the result is, on its face, constitutionally suspect.

>The various pieces of this argument are odd, but it seems to me that one runs across them more and more: the assumption, for instance, that religion is inherently irrational, and the assertion that religious reasoning is incapable of arriving at an extra-religious result, and the postulate that a sectarian motive is inherently illegitimate in a democracy.

Stone’s argument asks that religious believers *who are public officials* not inflict without argument their beliefs on others without an argument. He is not claiming that religious belief is irrational. Or the extreme case that anything sectarian have no place in a democracy. It’s just not *sufficiently* rational to say “do this because I believe it’s right.”

Begging the Question, Politicians

New Rights

A new law makes it a federal crime to cross state lines to avoid abortion parental consent laws. In describing the motivation of his support of the bill, Mitch McConnell, republican senator from Kentucky, said:

>”No parent wants anyone to take their children across state lines or even across the street without their permission,” Senate Majority Whip Mitch McConnell, a Republican of Kentucky, said. “*This is a fundamental right*, and the Congress is right to uphold it in law.”

As I read the Constitution of the United States of America, it doesn’t say anything about parental rights, or parents, or even children. So, I wonder such a fan of “strict constructionists” justifiies this strange new *fundamental* right. Is it perhaps penumbral? Is it somehow emboddied in the other explicitly enumerated rights of the Constitution?

Ad Hominem, Op-Eds and other opinions, Richard Cohen, Straw Man, V.D.Hanson

A game of pong

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In today’s Washington Post, Richard Cohen aligns himself with such bellicose pundits as Victor Davis Hanson as he argues for unhinged and indiscriminate violence against any and all associated (if only geographically) with Hezbollah terrorists. To suggest otherwise, as he *imagines* serious people have done, is pernicious anti-semitism:

>It also includes a whole bunch of European newspapers whose editorial pages call for Israel to respond, *it seems*, with only one missile for every one tossed its way. Such neat proportion is a recipe for doom.

>The dire consequences of proportionality are so clear that *it makes you wonder* if it is a fig leaf for anti-Israel sentiment in general. [emphasis mine]

Two points. First, those who have urged restraint have not suggested (and even Cohen admits as much with “it seems”) Israel engage in a game of missile pong–one for one. Proportionality is a principle of just war–of *jus in bello* to be exact. Those who urge it have rightly suggested that Israel not obliterate innocent civilians who are no more capable of controlling Hezbollah than Israel is. This argument is made on two independent grounds. First, it’s morally wrong to kill civilians. Second, as a matter of prudence, Israel cannot achieve its goal of eliminating Hezbollah by advertising for it’s most extravagant claims–that Israel engages in terrorism.

Second, to criticize Isreal’s reaction to the kidnapping of two soldiers (remember that) is not anti-semitic:

>These calls for proportionality rankle. They fall on my ears not as genteel expressions of fairness, some ditsy Marquess of Queensberry idea of war, *but as ugly sentiments pregnant with antipathy toward the only democratic state in the Middle East.* After the Holocaust, after 1,000 years of mayhem and murder, the only proportionality that counts is zero for zero. If Israel’s enemies want that, they can have it in a moment. [emphasis mine].

First, no one seriously urges the kind of silly military policy Cohen suggests; second, sometimes, believe it or not, Israel can be in the wrong–not because it’s *Israel*, but just because, like anyone or anything human, it errs.

So, Cohen, show how Israel is not wrong this time, not how anyone who criticizes them secretly wishes its annihilation.

***UPDATE***

It’s hard to say the author of the following in today’s Washington Post has in mind a straw man: we have seen in recent days on this site various iterations of the argument he attacks. Read the whole thing, but especially:

>Unfortunately — as the United States itself discovered during World War II and Vietnam, to cite just two examples — strategic bombing has almost never worked. Far from bringing about the intended softening of the opposition, bombing tends to rally people behind their own leaders and cause them to dig in against outsiders who, whatever the justification, are destroying their homeland.

While this point had already been made by Mr.Grey in a comment a few days ago, it’s worth repeating.

Argument Analysis

The Horror

Howard Kurtz of the *Washington Post* offers a perplexing translation of the dissatisfaction of “the left” with the Mainstream media. Take a peak:

>Trust me when I say that many liberals are really ticked off at the MSM, even though the nature of their criticism is very different from their rivals on the right. The anger that liberals feel over media coverage of President Bush and the war is tinged with deep disappointment over journalistic shortcomings and a hope, however vain, that things can be improved. *Why aren’t you on our side?*

The odd thing about Kurtz’s otherwise shallow two-party analysis (e.g., on the right they scream journalists and supreme court justices should be hanged until dead, but on the left, there is also criticism of journalists) is the partisan translation of the left complaint. But that translation hardly follows from Kurtz’s own description of the left complaint. The problem, according to Kurtz’s imaginary lefty, is journalistic shortcomings.

Here’s an example. Last week, for instance, a reporter for the *New York Times* claimed Hilary Clinton said democrats were “wasting time” with their obsession with gay marriage and so forth. The only problem, as you can read for yourself in detail here, is that Clinton wasn’t talking about democrats at all, she was talking about republicans. The clueless but famous journalist completely misrepresented Clinton’s words. That’s a journalistic failing.

So, back to Kurtz’s wacky claim. The argument of the left is that such journalistic failings constitute a problem. How he derives “why aren’t you on our side” from that is a mystery. The question, rather, should be, why don’t report the truth to the best of your knowledge (i.e., do your job)?

Argument Analysis, Op-Eds and other opinions, Plain Bad Arguments, V.D.Hanson

Dulce Bellum Inexpertis

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V.D.Hanson, professor of ancient history and conservative pundit (and fellow of the conservative Hoover institute) ought to know what the title of this post means–more on that later. Considering our recent history in Iraq and Afghanistan and the amount of terrorism that has inspired (rather than deterred), we were mystified to see such belligerent opining:

What then would be the new Western approach to terrorism? Hard and quick retaliation–but without our past concern for nation-building, or offering a democratic alternative to theocracy and autocracy, or even worrying about whether other Muslims are unfairly lumped in with Islamists who operate freely in their midst.

This reminds me of something I urge upon my students. If the answer feels easy, gratifying, or is strangely in line with how you wanted it to come out, or how you have always thought, then there’s probably something wrong with it. In this case the obvious thing is that terrorism asks us to retaliate massively. Isn’t that just what terrorists–these in particular–want? Since war is politics by other, mostly violent, means, the terrorists means of violence are some of his own, and much of ours in response. That’s why they attack us. Our massive air attacks–however precise–fill their ranks faster than they could ever dream:

Any new policy of retaliation–in light of Sept. 11, 2001, and the messy efforts to birth democracies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and the West Bank–would be something of an exasperated return to the old cruise-missile payback. Yet in the new world of Iranian nukes and Hezbollah missiles, the West would hit back with something far greater than a cruise missile.

They dream about ever more violent war with the US. And clueless hacks like Hanson would give it to them. The most surprising thing, however, is this:

If they are not careful, a Syria or Iran really will earn a conventional war–not more futile diplomacy or limited responses to terrorism. And history shows that massive attacks from the air are something that the West does well.

Massive assaults on Hezbollah from the air have not resolved the crisis as it stands. How would these assaults on other countries change attitudes towards Israel? How have the so far changed attitudes towards the US? Did massive air assaults bring about an end to terrorism in Afghanistan? In Iraq? To repeat the same belligerent opining that has achieved every aim the terrorists had boggles the mind.

It’s easy–pleasing as the Daily Howlermight say–to think these things about our the only weapons we seem to have in our arsenal. And, of course, (warning graphic images): Dulce bellum inexpertis.