Category Archives: Richard Cohen

General discussion, Plain Bad Arguments, Richard Cohen

Cordon Bleu

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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.

Richard Cohen, Straw Man

Implied messages

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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.

Ad hominem circumstantial, Richard Cohen, specious comparisons, Straw Man

On the other hand

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Richard Cohen on the vices of the two parties:

But the GOP's tropism toward its furiously angry base, its tolerance and currying of anti-immigrant sentiment, its flattering of the ignorant on matters of undisputed scientific consensus — evolution, for instance — and, from the mouth of Palin, its celebration of drab provincialism, have sharpened the division between red and blue. Red is the color of yesterday.

Ah, I know, the blues are not all virtuous. They are supine before self-serving unions, particularly in education, and they are knee-jerk opponents of offshore drilling, mostly, it seems, because they don't like Big Oil. They cannot face the challenge of the Third World within us — the ghetto with its appalling social and cultural ills — lest realism be called racism. Sometimes, too, they seem to criticize American foreign policy simply because it is American.

I think we have a case of false or forced equivalence.  First, prominent Republican national candidates, conservative news networks and magazines, as well as leading conservative thinkers and media figures espouse the views in the first paragraph; few leading Democrats of equal stature, liberal thinkers, think tanks and so forth hold the views in the second paragraph. 

Second, while for the Republican ills he mentions actual positions, for the Democrats he stresses their motives for holding the positions they hold.  So while the one party's actual stated policies are absurd; the other party might include those whose motives are silly but whose views seem otherwise not to be that bad–after all, it's good to criticize offshore drilling, to have a nuanced understanding of social and cultural ills, and to criticize American foreign policy, isn't it?

Richard Cohen, Unclassifiable

Slow boat

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As many may remember, the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" made up stuff about John Kerry in order to call into question the veracity of his accounts of his naval service.  As false as the stories were, the media couldn't get enough of the interesting questions such scurrilous accusations raised.  Should the media, the media wondered, cover such obviously malicious and false accusations?  There was an episode of Nightline in which Chris Bury (I think it was him) asked the viewers whether they found it to be an interesting fact that the media were covering this story.  In other words–don't you find it interesting that I am writing this–I do.  But most of all, people obsessed over what Kerry's response to the swift-boating said about him.  Everyone knew in polite society that the charges were false, but Kerry seemed so powerless to respond to them, didn't he?  Maybe that means the liar–the ones who make or refuse to dismiss such baseless charges, such lies (lies is the word I think for the things a liar says, I ask because I rarely hear it said)–has the advantage, that perhaps Kerry is weak and ineffectual.  That, I think, is the thought of a profoundly warped mind.

A warped mind–very much like Richard Cohen:

What Obama does not understand is that he is being Swift-boated. The term does not apply to a mere smear. It is bolder, more outrageous than that. It means going straight at your opponent's strength and maligning it. This is what was done in 2004 to John Kerry, who had commanded a Swift boat in Vietnam. Kerry had won three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star and a Bronze Star and emerged from the war a certified hero. It was that record that his opponents attacked, a tactic Kerry thought so ludicrous that he at first ignored it. The record shows that he lost the election.  

Cohen's point is not that the tactic of "Swift-boating" ought to be exposed for the lie that it is, but rather that Obama–the recipient–ought to learn to respond, because his response has been ineffectual so far:

"It's a real puzzling thing," Obama said matter-of-factly. And then he went on to recount his experience as a community organizer, ending with the observation that "I would think that that's an area where Democrats and Republicans would agree."

Oy!

It is true that on the stump, Obama goes on the attack. But those are fragments — maybe 15 seconds on the evening news. It is with extended interviews, such as the Sunday shows, that we get to visit with the man — and that man, for all his splendid virtues, seems to lack fight. Maybe he's worried about how America would receive an angry black man or maybe he's just too cool to ever get hot, but the result is that we have little insight into his passions: What, above all, does he care about? The answer, at least to the Sunday TV viewer, was nothing much.

And this is the response the Swift-boater is looking for.  It's a clever, but completely immoral tactic.  But it only works as long as there are people like Richard Cohen, who cannot bother to care whether something is a lie.  Instead of using his perch at the Washington Post, and his position as an alleged liberal commentator, to call a lie a lie and to talk about liars, he falls right into the trap.  

Inexplicable, Richard Cohen

I ask myself

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When I write–as I did here–that one just doesn't find many "liberals" on op-ed pages who behave as their conservative counterparts do, I was thinking not only of E.J.Dionne, who does basic reporting (polls show. . . ) not arguing (people ought. . . ), I was also thinking of intellectual giants like Richard Cohen.  Last time we saw him, he was grousing about tattoos.  Now he's got a crush on McCain.  He admires that McCain branded maverickness that takes the opposite of everything (mostly).  In yet another example of the premise which begins with a personal anecdote, Cohen writes:

"Just tell me one thing Barack Obama has done that you admire," I asked a prominent Democrat. He paused and then said that he admired Obama's speech to the Democratic convention in 2004. I agreed. It was a hell of a speech, but it was just a speech.

A prominent Democrat ought to be named in the first place, if his or her view is representative. 

On the other hand, I continued, I could cite four or five actions — not speeches — that John McCain has taken that elicit my admiration, even my awe. First, of course, is his decision as a Vietnam prisoner of war to refuse freedom out of concern that he would be exploited for propaganda purposes. To paraphrase what Kipling said about Gunga Din, John McCain is a better man than most.

But I would not stop there. I would include campaign finance reform, which infuriated so many in his own party; opposition to earmarks, which won him no friends; his politically imprudent opposition to the Medicare prescription drug bill (Medicare has about $35 trillion in unfunded obligations); and, last but not least, his very early call for additional troops in Iraq. His was a lonely position — virtually suicidal for an all-but-certain presidential candidate and no help when his campaign nearly expired last summer. In all these cases, McCain stuck to his guns.

So Cohen asks some unnamed person what he or she admires about Obama, then by way of comparison, he asks himself what he admires about McCain.  Why didn't he ask that same Democrat what he admires about McCain?  Or why didn't he ask himself what he admires about Obama–who knows what his response might have been.

Bad Explanations, David Brooks, Inexplicable, Richard Cohen

Teneo vestri vox*

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One can certainly trust the Post to select op-eds on the important issues of the day.  Richard Cohen edifies his readers with this gem:

Tattoos are the emblems of our age. They bristle from the biceps of men in summer shirts, from the lower backs of women as they ascend stairs, from the shoulders of basketball players as they drive toward the basket, and from every inch of certain celebrities. The tattoo is the battle flag of today in its war with tomorrow. It is carried by sure losers. 

Losers: Johnny Depp, Angelina Jolie, etc.

It gets better:

I asked a college professor what she thought of tattoos, and she said that for young people, they represent permanence in an ever-changing world. But how is that possible? Anyone old enough and smart enough to get into college knows that only impermanence is permanent. Everything changes — including, sweetie, that tight tummy with its "look at me!" tattoo. Time will turn it into false advertising. 

It gets better still, for the grumpy old man tattoo diatribe was merely a set-up:

The permanence of the moment — the conviction that now is forever — explains what has happened to the American economy. We are, as a people, deeply in debt. We are, as a nation, deeply in debt. The average American household owes more than its yearly income. We save almost nothing (0.4 percent of disposable income) and spend almost everything (99.6 percent of disposable income) in the hope that tomorrow will be a lot like today. We bought homes we could not afford and took out mortgages we could not pay and whipped out the plastic on everything else. Debts would be due in the future, but, with any luck, the future would remain in the future. 

I would say that getting a tattoo may be something remotely like what happened to certain people in debt, but I think it strains credulity to say that it "explains" the economy.  (For more on that topic, there's the almost–almost I say–equally shallow economic/social/political analysis of David Brooks in today's Times). Back to tattoos:

But the tattoos of today are not minor affairs or miniatures placed on the body where only an intimate or an internist would see them. Today's are gargantuan, inevitably tacky, gauche and ugly. They bear little relationship to the skin that they're on. They don't represent an indelible experience or membership in some sort of group but an assertion that today's whim will be tomorrow's joy. After all, a tattoo cannot be easily removed. It takes a laser — and some cash.

Finally:

I have decades' worth of photos of me wearing clothes that now look like costumes. My hair has been long and then longer and then short. My lapels have been wide, then wider, then narrow. I have written awful columns I once thought were brilliant and embraced ideas I now think are foolish. Nothing is forever.

Seize the day — laser tomorrow.

What about your columns, Richard?  You can't undo those.

*Teneo vestri vox doesn't mean anything, but it appears as a tattoo on Angelina Jolie in a recent movie.  See here for more.  But in the meantime, since so many have asked, here's why it means nothing.  Latin words get their grammatical significance from their endings (not, as is often the case, from their position in the sentence).  So teneo means "I hold," vestri (a possessive adjective without an antecedant) means "of yours [all])," and "vox" means "voice" or "the voice" (in the nominative case).  Put them together this way and you have nonsense: there's no grammatical object for the transitive verb, vox is nominative but is not the subject, and the possessive adjective doesn't modify anything.  You might as well string any three words together–dog yours telephone–and tattoo that on your body, that's about how much sense it makes.

 

 

Plain Bad Arguments, Richard Cohen

In your head

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One cause of sloppy reasoning is fixing the argument around the position rather than the position around the argument.  When you’re settled about what position you must hold, then your options close in around you.  To that end, there is an interesting article on the Monty Hall problem in the New York Times (by John Tierney of all people).  Another cause of sloppy reasoning is simple incoherence.  Richard Cohen, liberal pundit for the Washington Post, is sometimes guilty of this.  Today, for instance, he returns again to the issue of race and Obama.  Here is how he closes his argument:

From time to time, Obama is likened to John F. Kennedy
— both charismatic and inexperienced politicians when they launched
their presidential campaigns. But Obama could be like Kennedy in
another way as well. Kennedy was a Roman Catholic, and no Roman
Catholic had ever been elected president. In the 1960 Wisconsin
primary, he ran into a version of Cohen’s Law. He won the state but did
poorly in Protestant areas. A month later, he won in overwhelmingly (95
percent) Protestant West Virginia and did so because he bought a half-hour of TV time and confronted the religion issue head on. It was a landslide.

Maybe Obama’s Philadelphia speech on race served the same purpose. The results from the upcoming primaries, particularly Pennsylvania,
will tell. My guess is that he still has not put the race issue to rest
— maybe because he failed to do what Kennedy did in West Virginia. In
that speech, Kennedy told Protestant West Virginians that when
presidents took the oath of office, they were swearing to the
separation of church and state. A president who breaks that oath is not
only committing an impeachable offense, he said, "but he is committing
a sin against God." In other words, he told West Virginians that their
major fear was baseless.

Obama in his Philadelphia speech said nothing as dramatic. On the
contrary, when it came to the perceived threat posed by young black men
(one out of every nine is in criminal custody), Obama built a fence
around the issue by citing his grandmother’s "fear of black men who
passed her by on the street" — suggesting it was comparable to what
his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, had said. He did not confront white fears. Instead, he implied that they were illegitimate.

This is not 1988, and much has changed. For one thing, the GOP
nominee is going to be an aging foreign policy hawk with no coattails
to run on. But if the upcoming Pennsylvania primary simply echoes
earlier racial divisions, Obama has to give yet another speech — this
one directed not at the pundits he so enthralls but at the very people
who have so far rejected him on account of race. Will it matter? John
Kennedy proved a long time ago that it might.

In the first place, who are the pundits Obama enthralls?  And why do pundits like Cohen use the word "pundits" as a term of abuse?  He must not consider himself a pundit.  Or maybe he thinks you’re not a pundit if you use the word pundit to describe pundits.  Besides this, he clearly doesn’t read the pundits, for they’re not enthralled with Obama.  They, the pundits that is, often claim that we’re supposed to dislike Obama on account of his popularity among people, not pundits.

Besides this, there is a rather significant disanalogy between race and religion.  Kennedy could cease at any time to be Catholic (and, if the gossip is true, he ceased quite often and with different women), Obama cannot at any moment cease to be black.  No amount of swearing on the Bible will lay to rest fears that he’s going to continue to be black. What is Obama supposed to say?  "I’m not, you know (wink wink), one of those people"?

Lack of Evidence, Richard Cohen, Thomas Friedman

Taxi driver

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If we have learned anything from the war on terror, it’s that individual Middle eastern taxi, livery, and car service drivers have no special insight into world affairs.  Someone on the web has kept track of how often Tom Friedman used that kind of anecdotal evidence to characterize the opinions and feelings of the entire Middle East.  Now it’s time for Richard Cohen, liberal pundit of the Washington Post.  He writes:

In the end, the photos taken at Abu Ghraib produced an explosion of
outrage. When I visited Jordan in 2005, my driver — Bassam was his
name — brought it up himself. Just as the military’s interrogators
knew the intense shame Muslim men feel when stripped naked and viewed
by women, or when forced to wear women’s underwear on their heads, so
did Bassam deeply feel that shame himself. "We are Muslims," he said.

No offense to Bassam, but what makes Cohen think this guy represents anything more than his own view?  There is little question, by the way, that Cohen is right–he’s just not right on account of the testimony of this or of every conveyance driver he meets. 

Academics, Ad Hominem Abusive, Bloggers, Op-Eds and other opinions, Richard Cohen

Argumentum ad angelum

The following startling piece of reasoning may put us into new fallacy territory.  Glenn Reynolds, also known as Instapundit, writes:

RANK ANTISEMITISM in the Democratic congressional primary in Memphis:

"Memphis Congressman Steve Cohen and the JEWS HATE Jesus," blares the flier, which Cohen himself received in the mail — inducing gasps — last week.

Circulated by an African-American minister from Murfreesboro Tenn., which isn't even in Cohen's district, the literature encourages other black leaders in Memphis to "see to it that one and ONLY one black Christian faces this opponent of Christ and Christianity in the 2008 election."

Well, that just makes everybody look good. Jeez. I like Steve Cohen a lot, and not just because he once gave me some absolutely amazing John Fogerty tickets (to the Mud Island show that was his first appearance after a decade of not touring). But even if I didn't, this would be absolutely disgraceful. Perhaps Barack Obama should make a point of condemning this.

UPDATE: Why should Obama weigh in? Because he promises an uplifting new kind of politics and this is an ugly old kind. Because Steve Cohen is one of Obama's supporters, and political loyalty is supposed to run both ways — unless you're Hillary, anyway, and Obama's supposed to be the anti-Hillary. Because otherwise Obama's big appeal — I'm a black candidate who's not like Al Sharpton! — will be a fraud. And, of course, because it's the right thing to do.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Okay, the "fraud" bit was a bit strong. But it is the right thing to do, and it's the kind of thing that a guy promising a new uplifting kind of politics ought to do. Trust me, if the racial angle were pointing the other way, this would be getting a lot of attention, especially if it could be tied to a Republican. And I say this, remember, as a guy who went after Trent Lott for a lot less.

Let me get this straight.  First, an African-American minister having no relation to the Obama campaign sent around an antisemitic flier about a supporter of Barack Obama–and this not because he is a supporter of Obama; Reynolds therefore adduces that Obama needs to condemn this specific instance of antisemitism.  Why?

1.  Obama promises uplifting politics, and this is not uplifting;

2.  Cohen supports Obama;

3.  Otherwise Obama will be no different from Al Sharpton;  

4.  It's the right thing to do. 

How to understand this?  The second update merely softens the "fraud" allegation but it doesn't retreat on the basic argument.

 1.  The first reason is a curious kind of ad hominem—ad angelum–against the angel.  Because Obama claims to be against such politics, he will be held responsible for every instance of them, regardless of their relation to him.  His failure to act will be a sign of hypocrisy. 

2.  The second one suggests that Obama is rather not an angel, but some kind of horrible friend for not coming to the defense of his supporter. 

3.  The third resembles the first in that it holds Obama responsible for the dastardly deeds of others.  But this is more specific in that it stresses only the actions of other African-American people.  That's a very odd position to take, for no one expects Glenn Reynolds to denounce every instance of white people behaving badly.   

4.  The fourth only works on the theory that it's always right always and everywhere to do what is right.  Everyone knows that.  But why is it the right thing in this particular case?  I think the first three reasons were meant to establish this.  But they didn't.  

We saw this sort of argument a few weeks ago.  Richard Cohen had demanded Obama disagree more with someone's daughter's friend.  That failure, in Cohen's mind, results in Obama's embracing the ideas of someone who supports him.  We might have termed that argument an argumentum ad amici amicum–argument against the friend of a friend.

These arguments share the strained relevance of the ad hominem argument, but they carry one step further by replacing the attack the character of the arguer with an attack on the views of people in some (very distant) way associated with the initial arguer.  This loose association serves then as justification for the demand that the initial arguer vociferously condemn the actions or words of the loosely associated persons or risk confirming the initial suspicions.  When the pool of possibly associated individuals as large as Reynolds makes it, this becomes a rather difficult task.

via Crooked Timber and Sadly, No. 

Inexplicable, Richard Cohen

The enemy of my friend

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Richard Cohen, "liberal" columnist for the Washington Post, claims that Obama must disagree more with a person with whom he (i.e., Obama) disagrees.  To be more precise, Obama's minister at Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ, has praised Louis Farrakhan, violinist and noted anti-Semite.  He hasn't praised him for his anti-semitism.  Actually, he, the minister, hasn't praised him at all:

Barack Obama is a member of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ. Its minister, and Obama's spiritual adviser, is the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. In 1982, the church launched Trumpet Newsmagazine; Wright's daughters serve as publisher and executive editor. Every year, the magazine makes awards in various categories. Last year, it gave the Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. Trumpeter Award to a man it said "truly epitomized greatness." That man is Louis Farrakhan.

Got that.  The good Reverend's daughters' magazine has praised Farrakhan with an award named for their father. 

Anyway, so Farrakhan, despite liking Felix Mendelsohn, is an anti-Semite.  This is a silly view, Cohen argues, because many Jews gave their lives in the cause of civil rights for African Americans.  And he supports this with many paragraphs about what an anti-Semite Farrakhan is, how he is like another famous anti-Semite named Hitler, and so forth.  He then brings his argument to a close:

I don't for a moment think that Obama shares Wright's views on Farrakhan. But the rap on Obama is that he is a fog of a man. We know little about him, and, for all my admiration of him, I wonder about his mettle. The New York Times recently reported on Obama's penchant while serving in the Illinois legislature for merely voting "present" when faced with some tough issues. Farrakhan, in a strictly political sense, may be a tough issue for him. This time, though, "present" will not do.

But, as Cohen says elsewhere in the article:

It's important to state right off that nothing in Obama's record suggests he harbors anti-Semitic views or agrees with Wright when it comes to Farrakhan. Instead, as Obama's top campaign aide, David Axelrod, points out, Obama often has said that he and his minister sometimes disagree. Farrakhan, Axelrod told me, is one of those instances.

Take that Obama.  Cohen wonders whether you have the mettle to disagree with someone with whom you disagree.