On Tuesday the duly elected President of the United States will deliver a message to students across the land. The message? Stay in school. Fair enough. Reagan did it, so did Bush Sr. Bush Jr., I remember, went to read to children in a school back in September of 2001. Reagan and Bush Sr. delivered explicitly political messages (Reagan even talked about gun control). Here, for your viewing enjoyment, is the reaction of one particularly unscrupulous right wing talker. Key point: Obama's stay in school speech is "not entirely consistent with the idea of education."
Category Archives: Other problems
Problems other than specific logical fallacies–poor explanations, things that are false, and so forth.
Serious Breaches of Trust
David Broder argues today that while he supports accountability for illegal acts and serious breaches of trust, he does not support investigating illegal acts and serious breaches of trust. I have trouble putting these two claims together:
First, we should investigate and hold accountable the guilty:
My friend and fellow columnist Eugene Robinson has written a characteristically passionate and well-reasoned piece commending Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to name a special counsel to examine possible law-breaking by interrogators of terrorist subjects during the last administration.
But I think he is wrong.
First, let me stipulate that I agree on the importance of accountability for illegal acts and for serious breaches of trust by government officials — even at the highest levels. I had no problem with the impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon, and I called for Bill Clinton to resign when he lied to his Cabinet colleagues and to the country during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
I'm all for that as well. Now the second claim:
Cheney is not wrong when he asserts that it is a dangerous precedent when a change in power in Washington leads a successor government not just to change the policies of its predecessors but to invoke the criminal justice system against them.
Illegal acts. The policies of the previous administration may have involved–may have involved–illegal acts. Their being policies of an administration does not remove them from the realm of legal and illegal. At least I hope it does not. Broder continues.
I think it is that kind of prospect that led President Obama to state that he was opposed to invoking the criminal justice system, even as he gave Holder the authority to decide the question for himself. Obama's argument has been that he has made the decision to change policy and bring the practices clearly within constitutional bounds — and that should be sufficient.
Accountability for illegal acts. Now for some self-congratulation:
When President Ford pardoned Nixon in 1974, I wrote one of the few columns endorsing his decision, which was made on the basis that it was more important for America to focus on the task of changing the way it would be governed and addressing the current problems. It took a full generation for the decision to be recognized by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation and others as the act of courage that it had been.
It's hard for me to understand the logic of this argument. If Broder took the position that Clinton should have been impeached for lying in a civil deposition (lying to the country and his cabinet colleagues was not the crime in question, I think) about the character of an adult consensual relationship with a former employee, then how does it not follow that much more serious crimes (such as torture, murder, conspiracy, etc.) deserve at least to be investigated by the criminal justice system?
The ____r is now the ____d
Richard Cohen watches too many movies. For the basis of his op-ed on torture is the ticking time bomb scenario:
Call him Ishmael.
Call him a terrorist or a suicide bomber or anything else you want, but understand that he is willing — no, anxious — to give his life for his cause. Call him also a captive, and know that he works with others as part of a team, like the Sept. 11 hijackers, all of whom died, willingly. Ishmael is someone I invented, but he is not a far-fetched creation. You and I know he exists, has existed and will exist again. He is the enemy.
Now he is in American custody. What will happen? How do we get him to reveal his group's plans and the names of his colleagues? It will be hard. It will, in fact, be harder than it used to be. He can no longer be waterboarded. He knows this. He cannot be deprived of more than a set amount of sleep. He cannot be beaten or thrown up against even a soft wall. He cannot be threatened with shooting or even frightened by the prospect of an electric drill. Nothing really can be threatened against his relatives — that they will be killed or sexually abused.
He knows the new restrictions. He knows the new limits. He may even suggest to his interrogators that their jobs are on the line — that the Justice Department is looking over their shoulders. The tape is running. Everything is being recorded. He is willing to give up his life. Are his interrogators willing to give up their careers? He laughs.
This is really beginning to sound like a joke: the uber terrorist (played, believably, by Maori actor, Cliff Curtis), who knows our legal system and its "rights" so that his sneering makes Cohen's blood run cold. What about that guy, he wonders, what about that guy?
Well, I'll tell you what about that guy. He is the basis of Cohen's "hard case" moral lesson. A "hard case" should you wonder is a notion used by philosophers of law to think about the limits of general rules and such. But it also sounds like the title of a legal-themed adult movie, which is closer to Cohen's point anyway. Here's the moral lesson:
This business of what constitutes torture is a complicated matter. It is further complicated by questions about its efficacy: Does it sometimes work? Does it never work? Is it always immoral? What about torture that saves lives? What if it saves many lives? What if one of those lives is your child's?
Deep thinking. What if blowing up a planet deep in space with creatures uniquely able to suffer pain infinitely saved your child? Would you do it? Well, would you?
In case you weren't shocked by your own willingness to torture people to save "many lives" or "your baby," maybe you'll be impressed by a little bit of absurd moral equivalence:
Attorney General Eric Holder has named a special prosecutor to see whether any of the CIA's interrogators broke the law. Special prosecutors are often themselves like interrogators — they don't know when to stop. They go on and on because, well, they can go on and on. One of them managed to put Judith Miller of The New York Times in jail — a wee bit of torture right there. No CIA interrogator can feel safe. The interrogators are about to be interrogated.
No seriously, I didn't alter that at all. He really wrote that. We have reached new levels of badness here. Skipping to the end:
The questions of what constitutes torture and what to do with those who, maybe innocently, applied what we now define as torture have to be removed from the political sphere. They cannot be the subject of an ideological tug of war, both sides taking extreme and illogical positions — torture never works, torture always works, torture is always immoral, torture is moral if it saves lives. Torture always is ugly. So, though, is the hole in the ground where the World Trade Center once stood.
First you get a little bit of the "who's to say. . . in this complex modern world of ours" argument–call it the self-serving pseudo skeptical argument. Then Cohen converts it into a full-tilt "both sides" are wrong, there must be some middle ground. Top this off with an almost full tilt ever since 9/11 I've been enraged by Chappaquiddick.
Meretricious
Since George Will thought to write a eulogy for Kennedy which included the term "meretricious," we thought it might be entertaining to take a trip back in time. Here, via Hullabaloo via Somerby, is an excerpt from a 1995 James Fallows' article about Bill Clinton's 1993 attempt at health care reform:
Much of the problem for the plan seemed, at least in Washington, to come not even from mandatory alliances but from an article by Elizabeth McCaughey, then of the Manhattan Institute, published in The New Republic last February. The article's working premise was that McCaughey, with no ax to grind and no preconceptions about health care, sat down for a careful reading of the whole Clinton bill. Appalled at the hidden provisions she found, she felt it her duty to warn people about what the bill might mean. The title of her article was "No Exit," and the message was that Bill and Hillary Clinton had proposed a system that would lock people in to government-run care. "The law will prevent you from going outside the system to buy basic health coverage you think is better," McCaughey wrote in the first paragraph. "The doctor can be paid only by the plan, not by you."
George Will immediately picked up this warning, writing in Newsweek that "it would be illegal for doctors to accept money directly from patients, and there would be 15-year jail terms for people driven to bribery for care they feel they need but the government does not deem 'necessary.'" The "doctors in jail" concept soon turned up on talk shows and was echoed for the rest of the year.
These claims, McCaughey's and Will's, were simply false. McCaughey's pose of impartiality was undermined by her campaign as the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor of New York soon after her article was published. I was less impressed with her scholarly precision after I compared her article with the text of the Clinton bill. Her shocked claim that coverage would be available only for "necessary" and "appropriate" treatment suggested that she had not looked at any of today's insurance policies. In claiming that the bill would make it impossible to go outside the health plan or pay doctors on one's own, she had apparently skipped past practically the first provision of the bill (Sec. 1003), which said,
"Nothing in this Act shall be construed as prohibiting the following: (1) An individual from purchasing any health care services."
It didn't matter. The White House issued a point-by-point rebuttal, which The New Republic did not run. Instead it published a long piece by McCaughey attacking the White House statement. The idea of health policemen stuck…
Through most of 1993 the Republicans believed that a health-reform bill was inevitable, and they wanted to be on the winning side. Bob Dole said he was eager to work with the Administration and appeared at events side by side with Hillary Clinton to endorse universal coverage. Twenty-three Republicans said that universal coverage was a given in a new bill.
In 1994 the Republicans became convinced that the President and his bill could be defeated. Their strategist, William Kristol, wrote a memo recommending a vote against any Administration health plan, "sight unseen." Three committees in the House and two in the Senate began considering the bill in earnest early in the year. Republicans on several committees had indicated that they would collaborate with Democrats on a bill; as the year wore on, Republicans dropped their support, one by one, for any health bill at all. Robert Packwood, who had supported employer mandates for twenty years, discovered that he opposed them in 1994. "[He] has assumed a prominent role in the campaign against a Democratic alternative that looks almost exactly like his own earlier policy prescriptions," the National Journal wrote. Early last summer conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans tried to put together a "mainstream coalition" supporting a plan without universal coverage, without employer mandates, and without other features that Republicans had opposed. In August, George Mitchell, the Democratic Party's Senate majority leader, announced a plan that was almost pure symbolism–no employer mandates, very little content except a long-term goal of universal coverage. Led by Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich, Republicans by September were opposing any plan. "Every time we moved toward them, they would move away," Hillary Clinton says.
Another demonstration of "the merely contingent connection between truth and rhetorical potency."
Rationing
I think right now we have a system that rations health care. It denies it to the 47 or so million people who don't have insurance; it restricts health care to the people who don't have enough insurance; it denies it those people who get sick or have a preexisting condition; and it limits it those people who can't afford the limits and co-pays. The real worry, however, for Michael Gerson, is whether (1) somehow people can afford abortions–a procedure which is legal; (2) whether there will be rationing. To be fair, he admits–sort of–that there is rationing. Rationing done by insurance companies.
The same is likely to be true of end-of-life issues. Talk of "death panels" is the parody of the debate — hyperbolic and self-defeating. But a discussion about the prospect of rationing in a public health system is not only permissible but unavoidable. Every nation that has promised comprehensive, low-cost health coverage for all citizens has faced a similar dilemma. Eventually it is not enough to increase public spending or to reduce waste. More direct forms of cost control become an overwhelming priority. And because health expenditures are weighted toward the end of life, the rationing of health care often concerns older people most directly.
Keith Hennessey, former director of the National Economic Council, puts the dilemma simply: "Resources are constrained, and so someone has to make the cost-benefit decision, either by creating a rule or making decisions on a case-by-case basis. Many of those decisions are now made by insurers and employers. The House and Senate bills would move some of those decisions into the government. Changing the locus of the decision does not relax the resource constraint. It just changes who has power and control."
So he admits it. It would be nice at this point to talk about the effectiveness or the fairness of the current program of rationing. But no.
Because no one likes to ration directly, nations such as Britain and Germany employ "comparative effectiveness research" to lend an air of science to the process of cost constraint. Are "quality-adjusted life years" worth the public expense of a new drug or technology?
This type of question is unavoidable when resources are scarce and planners take charge. They seek to rationalize the inefficient medical decisions of families, doctors and insurance companies. But the very process of imposing a rational structure gives government extraordinary power. And the approach taken by planners is, by necessity, utilitarian — considering the greatest good for the greatest number. Decisions cannot be made on a human scale.
On the rough ethical edges of life and death, American health care has adopted messy, inefficient, decentralized compromises that a nationalized system is likely to overturn. Particularly if that system is imposed on a "go-it-alone" Democratic strategy, the divisiveness is only beginning.
The weird thing about this argument is that the insurance company is now the victim–not the perpetrator–of rationing. On the current system, they're the ones who decide who gets covered and who doesn't. The basis of their choice is a very simple and efficient one: (1) who is not sick; (2) who can pay. The very idea of alternative system, one which bases decisions on care on some kind of principle (and no for Pete's sake it doesn't have to be by necessity "utilitarian") to Gerson raises the specter of Soylent Green. It's people folks, it's PEOPLE.
Insured by Smith and Wesson
I think bringing guns to a town hall meeting about health care makes no sense at all (unless you're on your way to Afghanistan or Iraq, or police duty, or something like that, and have no where to put your gun(s).). The people bringing the guns, however, seem to do so to make a point about freedom–freedom for guns, I suppose. But we were talking about health care, so I don't get it. Despite the ravings of several enumerated lunatics, a system of universal health care derived from obligatory taxes is (1) clearly not unconstitutional and (2) it has nothing to do with guns (other than fixing the wounds caused by them). Finally, few people want to argue with the guy with an assault rifle. Maybe that's the point. If it is, poo-poo on the gun toters for trying to intimidate people.
Having said that, Now here's a crappy argument from E.J.Dionne against the bringing of guns:
The Obama White House purports to be open to the idea of guns outside the president's appearances. "There are laws that govern firearms that are done state or locally," Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, said on Tuesday. "Those laws don't change when the president comes to your state or locality."
Gibbs made you think of the old line about the liberal who is so open-minded he can't even take his own side in an argument.
What needs to be addressed is not the legal question but the message that the gun-toters are sending.
[For the record, I can't find the transcript of this remark, so I can't tell what question was asked] Dionne mocks Gibbs' (political) answer in one paragraph, and then affirms it in the second one. It's not a legal question, obviously; the people with the guns were not violating the law (it's up to local law enforcement to maintain order, etc.). As another political matter, by the way, Gibbs knows (I guess) that had he said, "shame on the gun people," we would be talking about that, and not, for instance, health care. I can think of an example of where someone said something about a white guy with a gun and our liberal media changed the subject from health care (any subject but that) to the white guy with a gun–care to guess what I'm talking about anyone?
Along those lines, Dionne wants to do the same thing:
On the contrary, violence and the threat of violence have always been used by those who wanted to bypass democratic procedures and the rule of law. Lynching was the act of those who refused to let the legal system do its work. Guns were used on election days in the Deep South during and after Reconstruction to intimidate black voters and take control of state governments.
Yes, I have raised the racial issue, and it is profoundly troubling that firearms should begin to appear with some frequency at a president's public events only now, when the president is black. Race is not the only thing at stake here, and I have no knowledge of the personal motivations of those carrying the weapons. But our country has a tortured history on these questions, and we need to be honest about it. Those with the guns should know what memories they are stirring.
I remember seeing a black guy with an AR-15 (that's an assault rifle of sorts). Besides, I wouldn't expect someone inclined to bring a gun to a debate about health care had in mind the vaguely relevant question of civil rights. As in the other case, this is not what it seems.
The gun guys and gals, I imagine, want to change the subject from the content of the debate inside of the hall, to the fact that someone had a gun outside of it. They're as silly as the ravings of the "Obama wants to ration toilet paper set." Let's ignore them.
Deny or disparage
This op-ed by John Mackey, CEO of whole foods, has caused somewhat of a stir. A bunch of people decided to boycott his store (and use his website to do so). I prefer the raw capitalism of buying from the actual grower–but I guess that makes me some kind of communist. Anyway, this morning I ran across a couple of tepid defenses of Mackey's op-ed. Here, Mary Schmich in the Chicago Tribune, and here the newly rejuvenated Kathleen Parker in the Washington Post.
Mackey lays out a series of proposals that address access to health insurance (but don't guarantee it); the only one aimed at reducing costs (aside from being healthy) is tort reform. I think tort reform is a dubious strategy for a libertarian–if you have any rights at all, you have a right to sue people for contract breech or for failure to perform up to a certain standard. There is empirical research of a kind on that point, however, which would at least address the question as to whether tort reform would have any effect on medical costs. Once that question is resolved, however, one would have to balance one's right to sue an incompetent doctor against the communist benefits of lowering health care costs across the board.
In addition to offering these and other points, he runs some counter arguments against "socialism." Since no one is offering socialism, or even socialized medicine (if you don't know that, step away from the microphone at the town hall, go to the local library [for free!] and read some newspapers) I can hardly applaud his courage.
He runs a version of the "rights" argument as well. I don't know where people pick up these arguments, but it's really silly. For some reason people have framed this discussion as one about rights–namely about the rights they're losing in having greater access to health care. Perhaps this explains why people show up at town hall meetings with guns. As Wyatt Cenac on the Daily Show indicated yesterday, that makes about as much sense as showing up drunk (which is another thing you have a right to do).
Here, in any case, is Mackey's right's argument:
Many promoters of health-care reform believe that people have an intrinsic ethical right to health care—to equal access to doctors, medicines and hospitals. While all of us empathize with those who are sick, how can we say that all people have more of an intrinsic right to health care than they have to food or shelter?
Health care is a service that we all need, but just like food and shelter it is best provided through voluntary and mutually beneficial market exchanges. A careful reading of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not reveal any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter. That's because there isn't any. This "right" has never existed in America.
Even in countries like Canada and the U.K., there is no intrinsic right to health care. Rather, citizens in these countries are told by government bureaucrats what health-care treatments they are eligible to receive and when they can receive them. All countries with socialized medicine ration health care by forcing their citizens to wait in lines to receive scarce treatments.
The idea that the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence (again–not a ruling legal document!) enumerate all of our "intrinsic" rights is silly. It's silly because, as people should never tire of pointing out, the Constitution, on a careful reading (slightly more careful than Mackey's) says:
Amendment 9 – Construction of Constitution. Ratified 12/15/1791.
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
There you have it folks. A careful reading of the Constitution shows that you may have more rights than the Constitution says.
One more obvious point. I think no one could seriously argue that the Constitution contains all intrinsic rights, such that their not being mentioned (see above, 9th Amendment) is evidence of their not existing. That would be circular!
Arthur Laugher
One reason it's very difficult to have a meaningful discussion about health care reform is that people do not seem to have a basic grasp of certain facts. Enter economist Arthur Laffer, someone who ought to know better:
"If you like the Post Office and the Department of Motor Vehicles and you think they're run well, just wait till you see Medicare, Medicaid and health care done by the government."
The government already runs those things–and people like them. In any case, maybe I don't always get my copy of Good Housekeeping on time every week, but for very little cost (and I think I'm ripping this off from Jon Stewart) someone delivers it to my front door. Besides that, the DMV seems to work fine as well. For me, the most difficult consumer experience of any kind I've ever had is with the cable company–and that was when I was trying to have cable installed.
via Steve Benen.
Slippery McCoy
The very idea of hate crimes laws drives some people deeply into the forest of confusion, where they forget that speech and belief is punished all of the time, and that doing so is not some kind of violation of one's constitutional rights. One's constitutional rights have some common sense limits: I cannot shout "fire" in a crowded theater, I cannot say (as someone once said to me–seriously) "I'm going to put a cap in your ass." Unable to countenance such distinctions, Richard Cohen, some kind of liberal columnist for the Washington Post, writes an extremely confused op-ed wherein he rejects the entire idea of hate crimes legislation. The whole piece hinges on the following snippet in the Senate discussion of hate crimes laws:
"A prominent characteristic of a violent crime motivated by bias is that it devastates not just the actual victim . . . but frequently savages the community sharing the traits that caused the victim to be selected."
Let's do some googling before we read Cohen. And when we do, we find that the passage he cites is not the definition of a hate crime, but rather a "finding." Here is the definition:
the term “hate crime” has the meaning given such term in section 280003(a) of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (28 U.S.C. 994 note).
Ok, so now more googling:
(a) DEFINITION- In this section, `hate crime' means a crime in which the defendant intentionally selects a victim, or in the case of a property crime, the property that is the object of the crime, because of the actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, gender, disability, or sexual orientation of any person.
Cohen ignores that–but refers instead to the "findings" of the new 2009 bill, and attacks that as if it were the very definition and sole motivation for their being hate crimes legislation. That makes the rest of the argument a hollow man–in that he attacks an argument no actually makes. He writes,
He [James von Brunn] also proves the stupidity of hate-crime laws. A prime justification for such laws is that some crimes really affect a class of people. The hate-crimes bill recently passed by the Senate puts it this way: "A prominent characteristic of a violent crime motivated by bias is that it devastates not just the actual victim . . . but frequently savages the community sharing the traits that caused the victim to be selected." No doubt. But how is this crime different from most other crimes?
How is "pre-meditated murder" different from "unpremeditated murder"? How is killing a police officer in the line of duty different from killing a rival mafioso? Why is it especially heinous to commit offenses against children and the elderly? Not all murders are the same, sometimes they have special conditions (premeditation), sometimes they have special victims (police, children, politicians). None of this is unusual or strange.
Cohen's argument stinks in other ways. He alleges a slippery slope without attempting to establish it.
The real purpose of hate-crime laws is to reassure politically significant groups — blacks, Hispanics, Jews, gays, etc. — that someone cares about them and takes their fears seriously. That's nice. It does not change the fact, though, that what's being punished is thought or speech. Johns is dead no matter what von Brunn believes. The penalty for murder is severe, so it's not as if the crime is not being punished. The added "late hit" of a hate crime is without any real consequence, except as a precedent for the punishment of belief or speech. Slippery slopes are supposedly all around us, I know, but this one is the real McCoy.
Criminal acts of speech, thought, expression (and even religion) get punished all of the time. It's not that hard to draw relevant distinctions (there will certainly be hard cases, but that's what the judiciary is for).
This op-ed is too full of confusion for one post, so I'll stop with the following:
I doubt that any group of drunken toughs is going to hesitate in their pummeling of a gay individual or an African American or a Jew on account of it being a hate crime.
Um–I really doubt this, but it also seems irrelevant.
The stain of ignorance
In order further to induce skepticism about global warming, George Will now invokes the words of Mark Steyn, a man with no apparent education or expertise on climate science, who in turn rests his global warming denialism on someone who who has no education or expertise on climate science. Will writes:
The costs of weaning the U.S. economy off much of its reliance on carbon are uncertain, but certainly large. The climatic benefits of doing so are uncertain but, given the behavior of those pesky 5 billion, almost certainly small, perhaps minuscule, even immeasurable. Fortunately, skepticism about the evidence that supposedly supports current alarmism about climate change is growing, as is evidence that, whatever the truth about the problem turns out to be, U.S. actions cannot be significantly ameliorative.
When New York Times columnist Tom Friedman called upon "young Americans" to "get a million people on the Washington Mall calling for a price on carbon," another columnist, Mark Steyn, responded: "If you're 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you're graduating high school, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade."
Which could explain why the Mall does not reverberate with youthful clamors about carbon. And why, regarding climate change, the U.S. government, rushing to impose unilateral cap-and-trade burdens on the sagging U.S. economy, looks increasingly like someone who bought a closetful of platform shoes and bell-bottom slacks just as disco was dying.
For the Steyn reference, see here (for the lazy, Steyn's argument rests on the discredited paper of a non-scientist). As a matter of logic, however, relying on the authority of someone else is a slightly more sound strategy than making stuff up–which is what Will did last time he talked about global warming.