Bush, Straw Man

Ask Questions

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There’s been a lot of talk recently about whether our President is an idiot. We don’t think that matters because in general with think such questions are a distraction from the real questions. How distracting is it? Look at this:

> My theory dovetails with something one of his most acerbic critics, columnist Molly Ivins, once wrote: “George W. Bush sounds like English is his second language.” That’s because it’s true. “Washington English” is a second language for Bush; “Texas English” is his first.

That’s Kathleen Parker. The problem with the plain-spoken meme is that it just doesn’t square with an Andover/Yale/Harvard education. Nor does it resemble the way his brothers or his family speaks. But like I say, that’s a distraction from things such as this:

>There’s a lot of people in the world who don’t believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern. I reject that. I reject that strongly. I believe that people who practice the Muslim faith can self-govern. I believe that people whose skins aren’t necessarily — are a different color than white can self-govern.

Are there now? Who are these people? Is it, perhaps, Pat Buchanan? Maybe it’s no one. And besides, he moved from “skin color” to the pleonastic “people who practice the Muslim faith.” Whatever questions this sort of argumentative nonsense raises about Bush, it ought to be pointed out by smart people in the media. In this case someone could have asked him a simple question: who sez?

Begging the Question, Bush, False Dichotomy, Formal Fallacies, Straw Man

Success is success

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A while ago we linked to an Associated Press story that said Bush often uses straw man arguments to advance his views. Since Bush doesn’t read “the filter” he never got the memo. But we think it would be nice if Bush reasoned or spoke coherently enough to commit discernable fallacies. Take a look at the following exchange from yesterday’s press conference:

>Q Quick follow-up. A lot of the consequences you mentioned for pulling out seem like maybe they never would have been there if we hadn’t gone in. How do you square all of that?

>THE PRESIDENT: I square it because, imagine a world in which you had Saddam Hussein who had the capacity to make a weapon of mass destruction, who was paying suiciders to kill innocent life, who would — who had relations with Zarqawi. Imagine what the world would be like with him in power. The idea is to try to help change the Middle East.

>Now, look, part of the reason we went into Iraq was — the main reason we went into Iraq at the time was we thought he had weapons of mass destruction. It turns out he didn’t, but he had the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction. But I also talked about the human suffering in Iraq, and I also talked the need to advance a freedom agenda. And so my question — my answer to your question is, is that, imagine a world in which Saddam Hussein was there, stirring up even more trouble in a part of the world that had so much resentment and so much hatred that people came and killed 3,000 of our citizens.

>You know, I’ve heard this theory about everything was just fine until we arrived, and kind of “we’re going to stir up the hornet’s nest” theory. It just doesn’t hold water, as far as I’m concerned. The terrorists attacked us and killed 3,000 of our citizens before we started the freedom agenda in the Middle East.

Idiot or not, this is laughably incoherent–especially the last remark. First he makes the “some say” move–“you’ve heard the theory.” But he doesn’t even bother to knock it down. Rather, he turns to his favorite subject–September 11. 9/11 happened even without the inspiration we have provided them in Iraq. That’s true, but it has nothing to do with the question asked. Neither does the hornet’s nest theory (which was, in a sense, Cheney’s theory during the Gulf War I). But nobody had really argued that anyway.

But the question asker–the one with the seersucker suit–kept at it (direclty following):

>Q What did Iraq have to do with that?

>THE PRESIDENT: What did Iraq have to do with what?

>Q The attack on the World Trade Center?

>THE PRESIDENT: Nothing, except for it’s part of — and nobody has ever suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack. Iraq was a — the lesson of September the 11th is, take threats before they fully materialize, Ken. Nobody has ever suggested that the attacks of September the 11th were ordered by Iraq. I have suggested, however, that resentment and the lack of hope create the breeding grounds for terrorists who are willing to use suiciders to kill to achieve an objective. I have made that case.

>And one way to defeat that — defeat resentment is with hope. And the best way to do hope is through a form of government. Now, I said going into Iraq that we’ve got to take these threats seriously before they fully materialize. I saw a threat. I fully believe it was the right decision to remove Saddam Hussein, and I fully believe the world is better off without him. Now, the question is how do we succeed in Iraq? And you don’t succeed by leaving before the mission is complete, like some in this political process are suggesting.

Sadly, there is much the logic professor could comment on. But again take a look at the last remark. Bush repeats something of the one-percent doctrine (see below). But he seems to have forgotten there was no threat to us from Iraq (and that Iraq has made the world less safe). We’ll leave to one side the “better off without Saddam” remark and its implicit false dichotomy.

The last remark, “you don’t succeed before the mission is complete” is questionbeggingly tautologous. Completing the mission defines success in Iraq for Bush, but the question is whether success can be achieved in this way, not, as Bush seems to think, whether success is success.

category mistake, Jonah Goldberg, Op-Eds and other opinions, Straw Man, Weak Analogy

Gator Aid

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Jonah Goldberg, the editor-at-large at the National Review Online might soon qualify for the category “not worth the trouble.” That’s not yet a category, but it should be–it would be filled with all sorts of tripe merchants whose reasoning is so bad that it doesn’t warrant anyone’s attention.

The other day we find him arguing in favor of ethnic profiling. As we are all accustomed to by now from right-wing columnists, arguments in favor of such things are typically arguments against the oppositions’ straw men. Take the following, which barely merits response:

>What is so infuriating about this is that the ACLU favors policies that discriminate against all sorts of people–old people, women, children and others who, under random searches and other idiotic numerical formulas, are pulled aside for no reason at all.

That being randomly searched constitutes “discrimination” offends the conscience.

Even more absurdly, Goldberg argues in favor of Cheney’s whacked-out “One Percent Doctrine.” In brief, Cheney has held that even if there is one percent chance of a terrorist using a nuclear weapon, we should treat it as a one-hundred percent certainty. Here’s Jonah:

>Ron Suskind’s new book, “The One Percent Doctrine,” explores Vice President Dick Cheney’s view that if there’s a 1 percent chance terrorists might detonate a nuclear bomb in an American city, the government must act as if there’s a 100 percent chance. Despite the guffawing this elicited from administration critics, it strikes me as eminently sensible. (If there were a 1 percent chance the snake in your back yard would kill your child, wouldn’t 1 percent equal 100 percent for you too?) The ACLU’s self-indulgent position, meanwhile, seems to be that if there’s a 1 percent chance a cop will be a racist, we must act as if it’s a 100 percent chance. And that means humans can’t ever be trusted.

Hard to know where to begin with this one. In the first place, we’d take issue with the method of calculating the odds of such events. Considering the way Dick Cheney and his fans hyped the possibility of Saddam having weapons versus, say, the government of Pakistan (which actually has nuclear weapons) falling, we’d have to say that the odds were really far below one percent. Second, it strikes us that Cheney and Goldberg have conflated logical *possibility* with *probability.* Two fundamentally different things. Anything that doesn’t imply a contradiction is possible. Saddam having ties to al Qaeda was possible. It just wasn’t actual or even probable. Anyone with a passing knowledge of his regime could have told you that. Now just because something is logically possible doesn’t mean that it should be assigned a probablity score. One percent, in fact, probably means very little or no probability anyway. So if we actually calculated numerically what Cheney meant, the actual chance would be far below 1 percent. Finally, that Goldberg is confused is evident from his specious analogy (click here to see others do the same on various topics). For many parents–especially those who live in the bug, snake, shark, and gator-infested parts of our country–there is a chance that they’re kid will get eaten by these things in their natural habit. Their solution? Keep their kids of out the water with gators in it. Goldberg-Cheney’s solution? Get rid of all of the gators.

Charles Krauthammer, False Cause, Ignoratio Elenchi, Post hoc ergo propter

Lessons unlearned

Nobody can stop neocons from gloating about the irrefutable successes of their policies. Not even a chorus of generals and other military types. Not even reality itself can stop them from learning all of the wrong lessons.

Some might remember the triumphalist claims made about the “Cedar Revolution” a while ago. We do–see here for more. Back then Charles Krauthammer, belligerent neocon, claimed that the Lebanese kicking Syria out was the product of our grand strategy of democratizing the Middle East.

Not so. But because he and others don’t get it, we’ll go over the basic idea again.

Today he repeats the same claim, and continues to fail to draw the right conclusion:

>What is most at stake, from the American perspective, is Lebanon. Lebanon was the most encouraging achievement of the democratization project launched with great risk with the invasion of Iraq. The Beirut Spring, the liberation from Syrian rule and the election of a pro-Western government marked the high point (together with the first Iraqi election, which inspired the events in Lebanon) of the Bush doctrine.

>Syria, Iran and Hezbollah have been working assiduously to reverse that great advance. Hezbollah insinuated itself into the government. The investigation of Syria for the murder of Rafiq Hariri has stalled. And now, with the psychological success of the war with Israel, Hezbollah may soon become the dominant force in all of Lebanon. In the south, the Lebanese army will be taking orders from Hezbollah. Hezbollah is not just returning to being a “state within a state.” It is becoming the state, with the Siniora government reduced to acting as its front.

The obvious lesson from this is be careful what you wish for, it might get you. Democracy, as we are learning painfullly in Iraq, sometimes produces results you can’t be happy with. The result in this case is a newly energized and democratically elected Hezbollah. All made possible by our glorious invasion of Iraq.

Ad Hominem

Standards

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A few months ago I read an article in The New Yorker about Bill O’Reilly. It treated O’Reilly not as the cyst on the derriere of our political culture but rather as an entertaining character one might see at a county fair. He’s not a character. He’s a real guy whose misinformation many people take very seriously. More recently, someone over at The New Republic wrote a somewhat similar piece about Ann Coulter. Sure she’s nuts and all that, but she’s a part of the political cultural landscape and besides sometimes she says stuff that might be kinda sorta true. Naturally, this poorly reasoned argument garnered much fierce, sound but most of all deserved criticism.

In response, Jonathan Chait of TNR writes:

>DEFENDING IDEOLOGICAL INCORRECTNESS:

>Elspeth Reeve, our extremely talented reporter-researcher, penned a clever, interesting, very well-executed defense of despicable authoritarian pundit Ann Coulter. Now, *I found her ultimate point to be highly unpersuasive,* as I imagine most people did, but this was a piece less about the destination than the journey. What made her column interesting was not *the counterintuitive shock value* but the fact that she had thought-provoking observations about Coulter’s role in the political culture, however indefensible her conclusion may have been.

>Her piece attracted the ire of Atrios, someone named Charles P. Pierce, and other partisan hysterics. That, of course, is unsurprising. *They cannot imagine the notion of measuring a piece by any criteria other than ideological correctness.* There are a lots of smart and interesting liberal writers who aren’t ideologically “surprising”–Rick Perlstein, Thomas Frank, most of the American Prospect staff, to name but a few. The Atrioses and the Pierces, on the other hand, offer their readers nothing but the certainty that they will confirm their ideological predilections. A world in which there are non-ideological criteria for judging an article–where being thought-provoking or smart matters–is a world in which they have no place.

And so the ad hominem, Bill O’Reilly style. Let’s not bother, so says Chait, with what they said about the piece (they did offer serious criticisms of the piece, follow the links above and see for yourself). Rather, let’s attack what we take to be their motivations. This silly, shallow and shameful.

But even worse than the inexcusable ad hominem (don’t they have editors?) is the assertion that simply being provocative–however wrong or dishonest–overrides editorial responsibility for truth and sound reasoning. Whatever happened to that?

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.

Your argument is invalid