Category Archives: Op-Eds and other opinions

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.

Ad Hominem, Ad hominem tu quoque, John Tierney

Et tu quoque Al Gore

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John Tierney, no friend of the global warming camp, discusses “carbon footprints” this morning in his “Times Select” column (sorry, no free access). Al Gore he says:

He advises you to change your light bulbs, insulate your home, and cut back on driving and air travel. If you must make a trip, he notes helpfully, “buses provide the cheapest and most energy-efficient transportation for long distances.”

And yet,

Fine advice, and it would be even better if he journeyed to his lectures exclusively on Greyhound. But he seems to prefer cars and planes. When you tally up his international travel to inspect melting glaciers and the domestic trips between his homes — one in Washington and another in Nashville, not to mention the family farm in rural Tennessee featured in the movie — you’re looking at a Godzilla-sized carbon footprint.

Tierney doesn’t draw the fallacious conclusion–that Al Gore’s position (we should reduce our carbon footprints) is false. Instead he seems to be suggesting the conclusion, which is not necessarily fallacious, that “Al Gore is a hypocrite.”

We should note that although this is not necessarily fallacious, it isn’t obvious that the evidence above provides good reason to believe that Al Gore is in fact a hypocrite. In fact, Al Gore–much to the chagrin of many environmentalists–has always favored various market solutions to carbon emissions:

Gore and David say they offset their energy usage by sponsoring reductions in greenhouse gases through alternative forms of power and energy conservation (like building wind farms and paying farmers to turn methane into electricity).

But, how does Tierney argue that this isn’t sufficient? By invoking the judgment of a more radical environmentalist position:

Quoting Gandhi — “Be the change you want to see in the world” — Komanoff says his fellow environmentalists should stop offering “get out of purgatory free” cards [carbon offsets] to the rich and instead insist that everyone personally reduce energy use.

So apparently, Gore’s position is not internally hypocritical, though Komanoff disagrees with it. Nonetheless, Tierney thinks that if you want to work to reduce carbon emissions you must accept Komanoff’s positions:

I’m not such a purist myself — I’d let the average person salve his conscience with a carbon indulgence. But I’d hold environmentalist preachers like Gore to higher standards, especially when they’re engaging in unnecessary energy use.

The tu quoque fallacy is an interesting one. If one is too explicit with the fallacy, it isn’t very effective. But subtle forms of it–like Tierney’s here–which assert hypocrisy and therefore suggest that the messenger and the message are somehow compromised are very effective. Most readers of Tierney’s column will probably conclude that because Al Gore is a hypocrite his arguments and prescriptions do not need to be taken seriously.

Charles Krauthammer, Equivocation

Rationalizing the ratio

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Often, as we’ve noted before, columnists eschew careful argument altogether preferring textbook rhetoric to assert and bolster a basic claim. Krauthammer’s column today fits this bill. “Disproportionate in What Moral Universe? rejects the claims that the Israeli response to the recent Hezbollah initiated conflict is “disproportionate.”

In just war theory it is a proportionality between the use of force and the end that is being achieved by the use of force (and not “tit for tat”). It’s not clear that Krauthammer has this notion in mind. He seems to equivocate on the notion of proportionality throughout his column. Generally he suggests that the Israeli response is not out of proportion to the Hezbollah attacks:

In perhaps the most blatant terror campaign from the air since the London Blitz, Hezbollah is raining rockets on Israeli cities and villages. These rockets are packed with ball bearings that can penetrate automobiles and shred human flesh. They are meant to kill and maim. And they do.

Israel’s response to Hezbollah has been to use the most precise weaponry and targeting it can. It has no interest, no desire to kill Lebanese civilians. Does anyone imagine that it could not have leveled south Lebanon, to say nothing of Beirut

But, the notion of proportionality should be sought between the end and the means:

On Wednesday CNN cameras showed destruction in Tyre. What does Israel have against Tyre and its inhabitants? Nothing. But the long-range Hezbollah rockets that have been raining terror on Haifa are based in Tyre. What is Israel to do? Leave untouched the launch sites that are deliberately placed in built-up areas?

The end that the Israeli government offers is the safety of its citizens achieved by disarming/weakening Hezbollah and creating a buffer zone in southern Lebanon. Proportionality thus requires that the force used is in proportion to the effect desired. Another way of expressing this would be to say that the military means should be enough to effect this goal without causing additional destruction or damage. If they destroy more than is needed to effect the goal, then the case that their war is just will be undermined.

The claims of “disproportionate” response arise because it seems very likely that Israel is targeting sites outside of southern lebanon and with not obvious connections to Hezbollah (relief trucks, Lebanese military bases, UN observer posts, communication resources, infrastructure, etc.) In addition they are targeting areas where there is “support” for Hezbollah resulting in civilian casualties. The Israeli government would claim that Hezbollah is using civilian populations as “human shields.” (Salon has an interesting piece claiming that Hezbollah militants mistrust civilian populations here).

But while granting that the Israeli government has the right to respond to the attacks and eliminate the threat of future attacks by Hezbollah, critics are arguing that many of the targets are spurious for these goals. We can’t evaluate the truth of that claim here. But the burden of proof lies with the perpetrator of the acts and such proof is not provided by Krauthammer’s vague and unsupported claims about legimate targets and military necessities.

Nevertheless, whether this is true or not, Krauthammer does not address the real question of whether targeting Lebanese army bases and relief trucks is justified by the proportionality requirement. Instead he equivocates between two senses of proportionality, with an excessive rhetoric that would justify virtually any act of violence committed in the Israeli attack.

David Brooks, Straw Man, Suppressed Evidence

Not even counting the dichotomy. . ..

We’ve left David Brooks alone for a while now, ever since the NYT decided that their op-ed columnists could generate revenue. But I’ll return to Brooks, with apologies for the impossibility of linking to the whole editorial.

As our readers know, Brooks has probably never thought up an over-simplifying sociological dichotomy that he wasn’t impressed with and convinced contained profound insights into politics and society.

In the world of public policy, there are ecologists and engineers. The ecologists believe human beings are formed amid a web of relationships. Behavior is shaped by the weave of expectations and motivations that we pick up from the people around us every day.

In contrast there are “engineers” who believe that rational behavior can be effected through offering incentives. This dichotomy like most of Brooks’ simplifications conceals more than it reveals. One suspects that most people are more like ecological engineers. But, we won’t even count the irrelevant dichotomy in his column.

Nevertheless, the object of Brook’s column is a Democratic Leadership Council plan to increase the financial resources available for College. This he claims ignores the ecology of college graduation.

A case in point: Over the past three decades there has been a gigantic effort to increase the share of Americans who graduate from college. The federal government has spent roughly $750 billion on financial aid. Yet the percentage of Americans who graduate has barely budged. The number of Americans who drop out of college leaps from year to year.

So, according to Brooks the percentage of students who graduate has barely budged and the number of College drop outs has increased, despite spending three quarters of a trillion dollars! What’s going on here?

For one thing, the number of college graduates has increased dramatically over the “past three decades.” (US Department of Education claims 5.8 million full time students in 1970 and around 10 million in 2005). So the really significant number is not the graduation rate but the number of college graduates. Thirty years ago only 47% of high school graduates attended college. In the mid-90’s it was around 66%. In addition the percentage of Americans in the workforce with a Bachelor’s degree has increased in the past ten years from 26% to 33%.

Brooks seems to be doing some fairly standard manipulation of statistics to suggest that 750 billion of tax payer money has not had any significant benefit. He may be correct. But the picture is far more complicated than he admits and his argument for this conclusion is extremely weak. We would probably call this “suppressed evidence.”

Second, it isn’t entirely clear that financial aid is thought to have such a simple relationship to graduation rates. Financial resources are obviously a necessary condition but not a sufficient condition of college graduation. The question that we would need to ask is not whether financial aid has increased the graduation rate, but whether it is affected the graduation rate. Perhaps, and indeed, quite plausibliy, without that 750 billion in financial aid many more students would not have considered attending college, or the drop-out rate might have increased.

The only evidence that Brooks offers against this is the claim that only 8% of students are “driven away by purely financial reasons.” I’m not familiar with this research, but it strikes me that “financial reasons” are rarely “purely” the cause, since struggling with finances have many other effects for students.

But as an “ecologist,” Brooks thinks that providing financial assistance for college is a insufficient condition for affecting college graduation rates.

You have to promote two-parent stable homes so children can develop the self-control they need for school success. You have to fundamentally reform schools. You have to expand church- and university-sponsored mentoring programs and support groups. As Caroline Hoxby of Harvard notes, you have to surround students with people who will help them make informed decisions so they can attend a college they find useful.

Perhaps that is so. But the impression that the only thing the DLC’s proposal amounts to is throwing money at the middle class to buy votes is a gross oversimplification of the problems of rising costs of higher education.

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, 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.