Category Archives: Op-Eds and other opinions

General discussion, Plain Bad Arguments, Richard Cohen

Cordon Bleu

2 Comments

There is an argument about torture floating around the punditsphere, Richard Cohen's variation goes something like this: After 9/11, an event unlike any other in the history of any civilized nation (not true), Americans strongly supported President Bush in his aggressive pursuit of the terrorist evildoers.  Some leading American legal minds, such as Jonathan Alter and Alan Dershowitz (I'm not making this up) openly mused about using torture of one form or another on certain terrorist suspects.  In addition, it is logically possible that someone tell the truth while under torture–a fact no one can deny (or has denied, by the way, because it's not the point).  On top of this, the people in their love of the TV show "24" and their high approval rating of Bush wanted torture, so it would therefore be wrong to prosecute or punish the people who waterboarded or otherwise tortured terrorist suspects or just suspects. 

I don't think I'm being uncharitable.  Here's his conclusion:

That, though, was the other country called the Past. In the country called the Present, certain people are demanding that the torturers and their enablers be dragged across the time border and brought to justice. There are many practical difficulties involved, but the impetus is understandable: A nation that once posed to the world as lawful and civil turned out to be brutish and indifferent to international law. We tortured. So says the incoming attorney general, Eric Holder. We tortured. So says the person in charge of deciding such matters at Guantanamo. That question has been answered. Now comes another: What are we going to do about it?

President Obama's inclination, it seems, is to not do anything much. "I don't believe anybody is above the law," he recently said. "On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards."

This is a nifty formulation that ignores reality; to look forward, you need to know where you've been. In other words, if we do not find out precisely how our government came to waterboard at least three suspects and abuse others, we will not know how to ensure that the future doesn't wind up looking much like the past.

At the same time, we have to be respectful of those who were in that Sept. 11 frame of mind, who thought they were saving lives — and maybe were — and who, in any case, were doing what the nation and its leaders wanted. It is imperative that our intelligence agents not have to fear that a sincere effort will result in their being hauled before some congressional committee or a grand jury. We want the finest people in these jobs — not time-stampers who take no chances.

The best suggestion for how to proceed comes from David Cole of Georgetown Law School. Writing in the Jan. 15 New York Review of Books, he proposed that either the president or Congress appoint a blue-ribbon commission, arm it with subpoena power, and turn it loose to find out what went wrong, what (if anything) went right and to report not only to Congress but to us. We were the ones, remember, who just wanted to be kept safe. So, it is important, as well as fair, not to punish those who did what we wanted done — back when we lived, scared to death, in a place called the Past.

I think this argument blows for at least three reasons.  First, not everyone wanted these things to be done.  Second, the feeling of support (however great) for patently illegal, immoral, and impractical activities such as torture does not make them any less illegal, immoral, or impractical.  Third, whether or not the will of the people had clearly expressed the specialness of the circumstances in their choice of TV show or Alan Dershowitz (how do you measure that anyway?), there still remain the more fundamental expressions of the will of the people–the constitution, our history of prosecuting people for waterboarding, the treaties and conventions practiced by our team–not to mention the more recent (and contradictory) expressions of our government's view on torture–such as, the arguments used against Saddam Hussein at his trial and before the execution of the war in Iraq, the arguments against the Taliban, and so forth–that stand as evidence that we do not and did not consider torture a legitimate legal practice.  Finally, a fourth reason, people in positions of authority ought to know better than to erect legal sophistries to justify practices which are obviously illegal, immoral and impractical.  They are elected and sworn to uphold the constitution for this purpose.

Accident, Argument Analysis, Fallacies and Other Problems, General discussion, Informal Fallacies, Jonah Goldberg, Paul Krugman

I’m not an economist

8 Comments

Since I'm not an economist, I can't easily judge the content of the Krugman's arguments against anti-stimulus arguments. But what makes Krugman stand head and shoulders above the rest of his fellow pundits, is that he makes arguments.

Next, write off anyone who asserts that it’s always better to cut taxes than to increase government spending because taxpayers, not bureaucrats, are the best judges of how to spend their money.

Here’s how to think about this argument: it implies that we should shut down the air traffic control system. After all, that system is paid for with fees on air tickets — and surely it would be better to let the flying public keep its money rather than hand it over to government bureaucrats. If that would mean lots of midair collisions, hey, stuff happens.

The point is that nobody really believes that a dollar of tax cuts is always better than a dollar of public spending. Meanwhile, it’s clear that when it comes to economic stimulus, public spending provides much more bang for the buck than tax cuts — and therefore costs less per job created (see the previous fraudulent argument) — because a large fraction of any tax cut will simply be saved.

This suggests that public spending rather than tax cuts should be the core of any stimulus plan. But rather than accept that implication, conservatives take refuge in a nonsensical argument against public spending in general.

Now to be fair, we can criticize the argument in a couple of ways–first, air traffic control involves a task of coordination and it isn't clear that priming the economic pump does in the same way. It isn't just that centralized air traffic control is more efficient than a "free market" equivalent. So we might ask whether the analogy holds.

Second, we might ask whether the claim that "taxpayer are the best judges of how to spend their money" (see last paragraph here) implies that all public spending should be replaced with private spending. A more moderate position might be to argue that when it comes to something like economic stimulus this principle holds true. However, Krugman is arguing against some of the simplistic and fallacious dismissals of stimulus spending, and so aims to free the discussion for substantive arguments from economists and policy makers rather than from the ideological hacks.

By the way, what is the fallacy in the argument he is attacking? Is it a fallacy? Accident, perhaps? Seems to involve the universalization of a principle that probably holds true in many cases (better to let me choose whether to spend my money on a Squeezebox Duet rather than a Sonos System, than have the government choose for me. Maybe something like "When there's no compelling public need, it is preferable to allow citizens to choose how to spend their money than have government choose." What counts as a compelling need is a political question–in the case of the stimulus plan Krugman makes the case that the public need is stimulating the economy and government spending is just much more effective than private spending in doing that.

The "fallacy" seems to work by arguing:

1. We accept principle x.

2. Principle x entails we should not do y.

3. Therefore we should not do y.

However, principle x is either a) not accepted as stated or b) when qualified does not apply to case y.

1. It is wrong to kill.

2. If it is wrong to kill then we should not use lethal force to defend ourselves.

3. Therefore we should not use lethal force to defend ourselves.

 But, either a) it is not wrong (always to kill) or b) it is only wrong to kill without justification.

The fallacy seems to arise when the principle is taken to be persuasive because on the surface it seems true.

Things that are false, William Kristol

A last column

A puzzling reflection from William Kristol's last column in the New York Times:

We don’t really know how Barack Obama will govern. What we have so far, mainly, is an Inaugural Address, and it suggests that he may have learned more from Reagan than he has sometimes let on. Obama’s speech was unabashedly pro-American and implicitly conservative.

"Unabashedly pro-American"–that's deep thinking.  "Implicitly conservative," well, that's obviously just wrong.  I wonder who they'll hire to replace him.  Perhaps Ben Stein.

General discussion, Michael Gerson, Straw Man, Things that are false

Childish Things

11 Comments

Michael Gerson, George W. Bush's former speechwriter, reflects on the meaning of the inauguration.  First, he sees a double standard in comparing the hypothetical (liberal!!) media coverage of John McCain and George W.Bush versus the actual media coverage of Barack Obama.

This inaugural week included a massive achievement in American racial history, an outpouring of civic participation and a gracious executive transition on both sides. But amid the celebration one could detect double standards all around.

If the outcome had been different in November, would John McCain's inaugural coverage have been quite as worshipful as President Obama's — during which the "shiver" up the leg of journalists finally became full-fledged convulsions? Why were the biblical references in Obama's inaugural speech not considered a coded assault on the Constitution, as George W. Bush's were sometimes viewed? And I can only imagine the cascades of hilarity and derision that would have come had Bush messed up the inaugural oath, no matter the cause.

But a sense of victimhood is not attractive from any political perspective. And so, in honor of the "era of responsibility," I put aside such childish things.

The comparison is absolute crap, to put it mildly.  Gerson ought to go back to the coverage of most of Bush's tenure in office for a nauseatingly sycophantic and incurious media, eager to repeat the lamest of his lines, to faun over his heroic landing on an aircraft carrier, his plain-spoken, I-want-to-have-a-beer-with-him (but not that effete, fat, ambitious exaggerator Al Gore) qualities. 

It would have been far less childish of Gerson had he simply not mentioned this things at all.

Now on to Gerson's other childishness.

Any American with a sense of history should feel that sense of awe. Minorities of every background must feel it most deeply. As the father of multiracial children, I feel it deeply enough.

But there was a second, less sympathetic, Obama enthusiasm at work. In a Newsweek essay, Michael Hirsh mentioned Obama's racial achievement. But he went on to say that "there's something else that I'm even happier about — positively giddy. . . . What Obama's election means, above all, is that brains are back." Hirsh declared that the Obama era means the defeat of "yahooism" and "jingoism" and "flag-pin shallowness" and "religious zealotry" and "anti-intellectualism." Obama is a "guy who keeps religion in its proper place — in the pew."

I only wish what Hirsch said were true!  The "flag-pin shallowness" and the other things, however, are in part at least media-driven narratives that won't go away anytime soon.  But aside from that Gerson cannot possibly be serious, the candidate for Vice President on the Republican side openly questioned whether Obama, with his effete university pedigree and tenuous association with a former domestic terrorist (and radical African American preacher), loved America, or was from "real America."  Notice that this wasn't the fringe crazies on Fox News, or Rush Limbaugh, it was the candidate whom Obama defeated in the Presidential election. 

Anyway, Gerson will have forgotten this, because he'll seize upon the remark about religion and accuse Hirsch of arrogance.   

There is much to unpack here. Can it be that Hirsh is "even happier" about the advance of liberal arrogance than he is about the advance of racial justice? And would the civil rights movement have come at all if African American religion had stayed "in the pew"? But suffice it to say that some wish to interpret the Obama victory as a big push in the culture war — as an opportunity to attack their intellectual and cultural "inferiors."

Cheering that the era of Joe the Plumber, John McCain's ignorant and confused campaign prop does not make one guilty of "liberal arrogance."  Nor does cheering the arrival of a President with the pedigree of an intellectual.  Most of all, however, rejoicing at the political marginalization of the narrow-minded Christian zealots does not have anything to do with the civil rights movement.  To be against, in other words, one particularly virulent and ignorant brand of Christian fundamentalism having a role in shaping government policy does not mean one is against religion having any role at all in the private and public lives of citizens.  Those are really different claims–and "in the pew" is obviously a metaphor only the lack of charity or ignorant yahooism would interpret literally (and then radically misapply).  

This line, given the either-orness of the last administration is the kicker:

Most of us have witnessed this attitude, usually in college. The kids who employed contempt instead of argument, who shouted down speakers they didn't agree with, who thought anyone who contradicted them had a lower IQ, who talked of "reason" while exhibiting little of it. They were often not the brightest of bulbs. Most people recover from this childish affliction. Some do not.

You have got to be kidding me.  The People who employ contempt instead of argument and shout down people they don't agree with–or openly question their sanity, patriotism, honesty, sexuality, faith, and so forth–are not obviously the same people who praise the arrival of an intellectual President, who only nights before his inauguration sits down for a discussion with the opposition's leading "intellectuals."

Lack of Evidence, Peter Beinart

The soft bigotry of low expectations

3 Comments

With Bush leaving office, people are now scrambling to say something nice.  Now enter Peter Beinart, liberal hawk, whose bad foreign policy judgment has propelled him ever upwards, as it nearly always does in the accountability-free profession of punditry (cf. Tom Friedman).  The wronger you are, the more jobs you get.  Anyway, Beinart today counsels "liberals" (by which he means irony-free stoners with no sense of history, practicality, or self-awareness) to admit that the surge–the 2006 increase in troop levels in Iraq–worked, and that it was "courageous" of Bush to do so.  He writes:

It's no longer a close call: President Bush was right about the surge. According to Michael O'Hanlon and Jason Campbell of the Brookings Institution, the number of Iraqi war dead was 500 in November of 2008, compared with 3,475 in November of 2006. That same month, 69 Americans died in Iraq; in November 2008, 12 did.

Violence in Anbar province is down more than 90 percent over the past two years, the New York Times reports. Returning to Iraq after long absences, respected journalists Anthony Shadid and Dexter Filkins say they barely recognize the place.

Is the surge solely responsible for the turnaround? Of course not. Al-Qaeda alienated the Sunni tribes; Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army decided to stand down; the United States assassinated key insurgent and militia leaders, all of which mattered as much if not more than the increase in U.S. troops. And the decline in violence isn't necessarily permanent. Iraq watchers warn that communal distrust remains high; if someone strikes a match, civil war could again rage out of control.

Moreover, even if the calm endures, that still doesn't justify the Bush administration's initial decision to go to war, which remains one of the great blunders in American foreign policy history. But if Iraq overall represents a massive stain on Bush's record, his decision to increase America's troop presence in late 2006 now looks like his finest hour. Given the mood in Washington and the country as a whole, it would have been far easier to do the opposite. Politically, Bush took the path of most resistance. He endured an avalanche of scorn, and now he has been vindicated. He was not only right; he was courageous.

It's time for Democrats to say so.

He probably could have done better than this if he wanted to praise Bush's courage and wisdom, as he has admitted that perhaps the surge wasn't the cause of Iraq's improvement after all, and, for that matter, he can't really say Iraq has improved.  Well, it has in one sense.  Fewer US troops are dying.  I would say that if you going to make a strong causal claim such as this one, and psychoanalyze people who fail to see the causal connection you do, then you ought to have a more convincing case.

Begging the Question, George Will

Inalienable

15 Comments

Whatever one's view of gay marriage, one has to admit that many arguments in favor of it rest on some notion of basic rights.  Whether that claim is true is not my concern now.  However, in the interest of full disclosure, I think that it is.  Whatever one's conception of basic rights, in a constitutional democracy such as our own, such rights are guaranteed by the constitution's bill of rights at the federal level, and by state's constitutions at the state level.  The structure our constitutions guarantees that constitutional rights do not depend in the first instance on the whim of the people.  We cannot vote that some minority group be stripped of its constitutional rights.  Constitutional rights are guarantees, aren't they?  

Let's set the stage.  Here's aspiring legal scholar, George Will:

In November, 13,402,566 California voters expressed themselves for or against Proposition 8, which said that their state's Constitution should be amended to define marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman. The voters, confident that they had a right to decide this question by referendum, endorsed Proposition 8 by a margin of 52.3 to 47.7 percent

Well, that's the question isn't it–whether the voters were acting constitutionally (thinking you are, by the way, does not mean you are).  Do the voters get to decide which rights people have according to the constitution by constitutional referendum?  On the one hand, the constitution is malleable by referendum.  And good thing too.  But Will argues that this right has no boundaries.  But this power of referendum certainly cannot be infinite.  I mean, for instance, you can't have explicitly contradictory provisions.  That would mean legal chaos.  You cannot, in other words, answer every constitutional question by referendum.  This way we cannot have an election stripping Mormons of the right to vote, or women of the right to be physicists.  So, in other words, which rights are of this type is the question.  Does civil marriage constitute one such right?  Here's Jerry Brown (in the words of George Will):

Now comes California's attorney general, Jerry Brown — always a fountain of novel arguments — with a 111-page brief asking the state Supreme Court to declare the constitutional amendment unconstitutional. He favors same-sex marriages and says the amendment violates Article 1, Section 1, of California's Constitution, which enumerates "inalienable rights" to, among other things, liberty, happiness and privacy. 

And that's an interesting argument, I think.  If certain rights are inalienable, then it's constitutionally prohibited that they be alienable by referendum, even if that referendum was believed to be constitutional by the voters.  The proper place to answer such questions–that is, about the constitutionality of the questions–is also provided in our constitutions–the courts, whose job it is to interpret the law.  One needs generally to interpret documents whose meaning and provisions are sometimes unclear.  And this seems like an instance of that.  But not to George Will:

Brown's audacious argument is a viscous soup of natural-law and natural-rights philosophizing, utterly untethered from case law. It is designed to effect a constitutional revolution by establishing an unchallengeable judicial hegemony. He argues that:

The not-really-sovereign people cannot use the constitutionally provided amendment process to define the scope of rights enumerated in the Constitution; California's judiciary, although established by the state's Constitution, has the extra-constitutional right to supplement that enumeration by brooding about natural law, natural justice and natural rights, all arising from some authority somewhere outside the Constitution; the judiciary has the unchallengeable right to say what social policies are entailed by or proscribed by the state Constitution's declaration of rights and other rights discovered by judges.

What is natural justice? Learned and honorable people disagree. Which is why such consensus as can be reached is codified in a constitution. But Brown's reasoning would make California's Constitution subordinate to judges' flights of fancy regarding natural justice. Judges could declare unconstitutional any act of Constitution-revising by the people.

That's the constitutional role of the judiciary (as established by case law).  Their having this role does not mean the people of California are not "sovereign."  That misses the point of Brown's objection.  And it misses the point of our constitutional structure.  It's the constitutional job of the judiciary to interpret the law.  How do they do that?  You can't ask the law you're interpreting, because you have to interpret it.  What to do?  Antonin Scalia, for instance, uses a dictionary.  Clarence Thomas, get this, natural law–whatever that is.

Richard Cohen, Straw Man

Implied messages

4 Comments

Like so few in our liberal media, Richard Cohen has the balls to stand up to the enemies of Israel (in his print column).  But rather than doing the cowardly thing of engaging with an actually informed person, Cohen takes the bold step of making up an unnamed opponent with a weak argument.  This way Cohen sacrifices himself by making his own argument look weak, and himself like a cowardly jerk, while he is really just courageously distracting his readers from seeing the moral complexity of the current situation in Gaza.  He writes:

I get the impression that Israel is expected to put up with this. The implied message from demonstrators and some opinion columnists is that this is the price Israel is supposed to pay for being, I suppose, Israel. I am informed by a Palestinian journalist in a Post op-ed that Israel is trying to stop "amateur rockets from nagging the residents of some of its southern cities." In Sderot, I saw homes nagged to smithereens.

Yes, of course.  Those who think that Israel should sit back and do nothing while being bombed can raise their hands now.  Anyway, Cohen is such a vicariously belligerent dishonest dumbass that he cuts out the second part of the quote above.  Here it is:

In its efforts to stop amateur rockets from nagging the residents of some of its southern cities, Israel appears to have given new life to the fledging Islamic movement in Palestine. 

Not to be pedantic, but the point is that Israel has strengthened the hands of Hamas by responding in the way that it has.  But Cohen, who "gets the impression" and sees the "implied message," deprives his readers of the pleasure of seeing that "the politics by other means part" of the current war might not have been wisely thought out.  It takes, however, real courage to make up, and then face down, such hollow men.  People, after all, might think Cohen a superficial sort of thinker.

George Will, Plain Bad Arguments, Weak Analogy

You’re on your own

4 Comments

It wasn't long ago that George Will called Obama's very catchy "you're on your own" line (from his acceptance speech) a straw man of the (discredited) Republican philosophy of government.  So I was struck when I read this encomium to being on one's own (creepy lines in bold).

When Medicare was created in 1965, America's median age was 28.4; now it is 36.6. The elderly are more numerous, and medicine is more broadly competent than was then anticipated. Leavitt says that Medicare's "big three" hospital procedure expenses today are hip and knee replacements and cardiovascular operations with stents, which were not on medicine's menu in 1965.

After being elected to three terms as Utah's governor, but before coming to HHS, Leavitt headed the Environmental Protection Agency. He came to consider it a public health agency because the surge in Americans' longevity in the last third of the 20th century correlated with cleaner air and fewer waterborne diseases. Longevity is, however, expensive, and demography is compounding the problem.

In the 43 years since America decided that health care for the elderly would be paid for by people still working, the ratio of workers to seniors has steadily declined. And the number of seniors living long enough to have five or more chronic conditions — 23 percent of Medicare beneficiaries — has increased. Many of those conditions could be prevented or managed by better decisions about eating, exercising and smoking. The 20 percent of Americans who still smoke are a much larger percentage of the 23 percent who consume 67 percent of Medicare spending. Furthermore, nearly 30 percent of Medicare spending pays for care in the final year of patients' lives.

If only we could find some kind of completely tone-deaf market analogy for how medicare should work:

Suppose, says Leavitt, buying a car were like getting a knee operation. The dealer would say he does not know the final cumulative price, so just select a car and begin using it. Then a blizzard of bills would begin to arrive — from the chassis manufacturer, the steering-wheel manufacturer, the seat and paint manufacturers. The dealership would charge for the time the car spent there, and a separate charge would cover the salesperson's time.

Leavitt says that until health-care recipients of common procedures can get, upfront, prices they can understand and compare, there will be little accountability or discipline in the system: "In the auto industry, if the steering-wheel maker charges an exorbitant price, the car company finds a more competitive supplier. In health care, if the medical equipment supplier charges an exorbitant price, none of the other medical participants care."

The auto industry?  The one with the huge bailout?  Anyway, back to the ice floe:

Rather than ruining the new year by dwelling on Medicare's unfunded liabilities of about $34 trillion (over a 75-year span), ruin it with this fact: In the next 50 years, Medicaid, the program for the poor — broadly, sometimes very broadly defined — could become a bigger threat than Medicare to the nation's prosperity.

This is partly because of the cost of long-term care for the indigent elderly, some of whom shed assets to meet Medicaid's eligibility standard — sometimes as high as income under 200 percent of the federal poverty level. And many states, eager to expand the ranks of the dependent with the help of federal Medicaid money, use "income disregards" to make poverty an elastic concept. For example, they say: A person who gets a raise that eliminates his eligibility can disregard the portion of his income that pays for housing or transportation.

Governments with powerful political incentives to behave this way will play an increasingly large role in health care. As is said, if you think health care is expensive now, just wait until it is free.

Indigent elderly, since you're a threat to our nation's prosperity, "you're on your own."

Ignoratio Elenchi, Ruth Marcus

Saddamy

The op-ed page at the New York Times is pretty bad, what with Dowd, Kristol and Friedman, but the op-ed page at the Washington Post is worse.  To end the year on a negative note, here's Ruth Marcus on why an Obama administration should not pursue criminal charges against Bush administration officials who broke the law.  The whole thing amounts to a classic ignoratio elenchi–none of Marcus's arguments prove or really even support the conclusion that criminal prosecution against Bush administration officials should not be pursued.  My comements in brackets.

First, criminal prosecution isn't the only or necessarily the most effective mechanism for deterrence. To the extent that they weigh the potential penalties for their actions, government officials worry as much about dealing with career-ruining internal investigations or being hauled before congressional committees. Criminal prosecution and conviction requires such a high level of proof of conscious wrongdoing that the likelihood of those other punishments is much greater. [deterrence isn't the only point of criminal prosecution].

Second, the looming threat of criminal sanctions did not do much to deter the actions of Bush administration officials. "The Terror Presidency," former Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith's account of the legal battles within the administration over torture and wiretapping, is replete with accounts of how officials proceeded despite their omnipresent concerns about legal jeopardy.

"In my two years in the government, I witnessed top officials and bureaucrats in the White House and throughout the administration openly worrying that investigators acting with the benefit of hindsight in a different political environment would impose criminal penalties on heat-of-battle judgment calls," Goldsmith writes. [Goldsmith's characterization only underscores the dubious legality of the actions of administration officials]

Third, punishment is not the only way to prevent wrongdoing. If someone is caught breaking into your house, by all means, press charges. But you might also want to consider installing an alarm system or buying stronger locks. Responsible congressional oversight, an essential tool for checking executive branch excesses, was lacking for much of the Bush administration. [This is the same as one.  It's also just irrelevant.]

Fourth, there is a cost to pursuing criminal charges. As appalling as waterboarding is, for example, it was pursued with the analysis and approval of lawyers who concluded, however wrongly, that it did not rise to the level of torture. If government officials cannot safely rely on legal advice, they will err on the side of excessive timidity. [All criminal defendants can find lawyers who can argue however erroneously that they're client did nothing illegal–this does not make it legal]

Fifth, focusing governmental energy on uncovering and punishing the actions of the past will inevitably drain energy and political capital from the new administration. It would be a better use of the administration's time to figure out how to close Guantanamo and deal with the remaining prisoners. [these are not mutually exclusive]

In a State of the Union address in 2003, Bush uttered the following words about Saddam:

The dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages — leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind, or disfigured. Iraqi refugees tell us how forced confessions are obtained — by torturing children while their parents are made to watch. International human rights groups have catalogued other methods used in the torture chambers of Iraq: electric shock, burning with hot irons, dripping acid on the skin, mutilation with electric drills, cutting out tongues, and rape. If this is not evil, then evil has no meaning. (Applause.) 

Saddam's leaving thousands of Iraqis dead and obtaining false confessions through torture were lawlessness on a scale worthy of military invasion at the cost of thousands of lives of killed and wounded soldiers and civilians.  One would think that such things might be worthy of criminal investigation, and, perhaps, prosecution.

Eugene Robinson, General discussion, Plain Bad Arguments

Ch-ch-ch-changes

4 Comments

So it turns out that my dear governor was everything everyone thought he would be.  One local media person covering the current and hopefully soon to be former governor's long ago Congressional campaign, said that after talking to him, "you wanted to check your wallet and take a shower."  Eugene Robinson feels the same way, more or less, that everyone does.  Whether any of the charges are really justified will have to wait for trial, as it should. Nonetheless, Robinson, a member of the liberal media, has found a way to imagine Obama into the middle of this mess.  

In handling questions about the arrest of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich — for allegedly trying to sell President-elect Barack Obama's former Senate seat to the highest bidder — Obama has gone strictly by the book. His statements have been cautious and precise, careful not to get ahead of the facts or make declarations that might later have to be retracted.

For most politicians, that would be good enough. For Obama, who inspired the nation with a promise of "change we can believe in," it's not.

The scandal involves Obama in only the most tangential way, as far as anyone knows, and actually seems to cast him in a favorable light. But the longer he leaves obvious questions unanswered, the longer the president-elect will have to talk about the seamier side of Illinois politics rather than initiatives such as saving the U.S. auto industry or revamping health care.

By all accounts, Obama is a pretty careful guy.  He's about to be inaugurated President of the United States, so he's justifiably careful about the legal implications of what he says.  He's probably also knows that whatever he says will receive heavy amount of interpretation. Regardless, he has called upon his staff to reveal any contacts with Blagojevich, and he has asked the governor to resign from office.  What more does Robinson want?  What would constitute "change" in this circumstance?  Robinson answers:

None of this is likely to hurt Obama in any material way or even dim the glow of his victory and upcoming inauguration. But maybe it can be a lesson. Real "change" would be throwing away the playbook and getting all the facts out now, rather than later. 

That's pretty silly.  And it's an impossibly stupid standard for "change."  It's not unlike asking someone participating in a legal battle not to seek legal counsel–why, after all, would he need legal counsel if he's not guilty?