Tag Archives: John McCain

General discussion, George Will, Lack of Evidence, Plain Bad Arguments, Straw Man

American idle

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In the wake of David Brooks's critical piece on Sarah Palin, I was going to point out that perhaps I was wrong about the right wing pundit corps.  Maybe they don't marshal any argument, however foolish, in support of their "guy," whoever their guy is, or however silly his policy prescriptions.  That would have been fun to write, as I enjoy being wrong, despite what people may think.  But then I run across this morning's George Will column.  He's not pro-Palin, but that's not going to stop him from making a pitch for McCain.  Well it's not really a pitch for McCain, since he doesn't mention any of McCain's numerous virtues or policy proposals as a reason to vote for him.

What worries George Will, reputedly some kind of libertarian, about a Democratic Presidency is the possibility of (a) an (unlikely I think) expansion of unionization, (b) universal health care, (c) (unlikely again) laws regarding political speech.  As a rule, one ought to dismiss out of hand Will's characterization of these issues, as he is, unfortunately, a serial straw man constructor.  Perhaps one might find better arguments against those things elsewhere.  What's silly is that these three things pose such a danger to the country and liberty, that Will finds their possible vetoing sufficient reason to vote for McCain.  I mean, as they say, come on you've got to be kidding me.  This is all you have?

Well, in other ironic matters, there's this:

Palin is as bracing as an Arctic breeze and delightfully elicits the condescension of liberals whose enthusiasm for everyday middle-class Americans cannot survive an encounter with one. But the country's romance with her will, as romances do, cool somewhat, and even before November some new fad might distract a nation that loves "American Idol" for the metronomic regularity with which it discovers genius in persons hitherto unsuspected of it.  

"Liberals," of course, are elitists–i.e., not "everyday middle-class Americans."  Don't they, by the way, belong to unions?  Unions like the ones whose expansion this piece claims to offer reason to oppose?  Then of course the irony: George Will, cursing elitism, makes fun not only of what lots of people watch, but of their aesthetic judgments as well.  But perhaps he never cursed elitism.

In a related matter–this is dumbfoundingly hilarious.

General discussion, Narrativism, William Kristol

Hope weaver

One definitive feature of the op-ed page is that you can say anything that might possibly remotely have a possibility of being someone's actual view–not that it has to be true, someone just has to believe that it could be.  This, I think, is the only way one might explain Bill Kristol's latest piece.  He writes:

Meanwhile, the Republican Party — which had nominated a Bush for president or vice president in six of the last seven elections — chose as its nominee a troublemaker who was George W. Bush’s main challenger in 2000 and his sharp critic for much of his administration. John McCain wasn’t on particularly good terms with either the G.O.P. establishment or the leaders of the conservative movement — yet he won. He then put on a Republican convention that barely acknowledged the existence of the current Republican administration.

And he chose as his running mate Sarah Palin, one of the least-known outsiders to be picked in modern times, and the first woman on a Republican ticket.

This in turn sent other establishments into a frenzy.

The media establishment was horrified. Its members expressed their disapproval. Palin became more popular. They got even more frustrated. And so we had the spectacle last week of ABC’s Charlie Gibson, one of the most civil of the media bigwigs, unable to help himself from condescending to Palin as if he were a senior professor forced to waste time administering a Ph.D. exam to a particularly unpromising graduate student.

The campaign narrative that McCain–who voted with Bush 90 percent of the time and who vows to continue most if not all of Bush's disastrous policies–is a "troublemaker" is astoundingly false.  Aside from the depressingly true remark at the end of the quoted passage, Palin also represents in every respect the hard right wing of the party–and she too embraces the glorious policies of that consummate outsider, the rebel from Texas, George W. Bush, current President of the United States.

General discussion

An Army of One

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Perhaps I don't need to make the point (again) that there is essentially is no mainline liberal pundit army.  There are liberal pundits, maybe lots of them, but they don't work with the kind of mission-oriented military discipline as their conservative counterparts.  They're more likely, in fact, to criticize the liberal guy than to advance his arguments.  For more on that, see here.

Having said that, all of the griping about Obama not being forceful enough in his response to McCain's sea of BS seems somewhat misplaced.  Obama is only one guy.  McCain is more than that.  He has in the first place an army of pundits who will either repeat his talking points, or invent their own arguments to advance his cause, which they may see to some extent as their cause.  While George Will, for instance, may not emphatically support McCain, he cares enough to argue that whether one is economically better off should not matter anymore as a reliable guide in the current election.  It's a ridiculous argument, but it comes out just in time to support McCain and it seems in fact that Will thought it up all on his own.  No one needs to tell him McCain needs help.  On top of this pundit army, McCain also has a television network (Fox), and legions of well-disciplined bloggers. 

On top of this, of course, Obama can't even count on the press.  Here, for instance, is an actual exchange on the TV about the McCain campaign's tendancy to make stuff up:

ROBERTS: That would appear, Paul, to end any argument over whether or not she supported the bridge initially. But why can't Barack Obama make that point stick?

Roberts, a journalist, responsible for separating the true from the false, wonders why Obama can't make the point that the true and the false are different.  That's Roberts job, at least in a normal world.  What does Roberts say?

ROBERTS: We still have 56 days to talk about this back and forth.

That's just nuts.

With that, when Paul Krugman, not a huge fan of Obama, says:

Did you hear about how Barack Obama wants to have sex education in kindergarten, and called Sarah Palin a pig? Did you hear about how Ms. Palin told Congress, “Thanks, but no thanks” when it wanted to buy Alaska a Bridge to Nowhere?

These stories have two things in common: they’re all claims recently made by the McCain campaign — and they’re all out-and-out lies.

Dishonesty is nothing new in politics. I spent much of 2000 — my first year at The Times — trying to alert readers to the blatant dishonesty of the Bush campaign’s claims about taxes, spending and Social Security.

He's virtually alone.  If Obama is having trouble, this is part of the reason why–there seems to be only one top shelf pundit making actual arguments in his favor.

David Brooks, False Dichotomy, George Will, Straw Man

Better off

Now perhaps that the answer is likely to be "sadly, no," George Will no longer wants to hear the question: "are you better off than you were four years ago?"  In all fairness, his problem is McCain's use of this very Reaganite phrase.  When Reagan used it, of course, it made sense:

The nation considered the answer obvious. Reeling from oil shocks worse than today's, with 52 U.S. hostages in Tehran and with the Soviet Union rampant in Afghanistan, voters resoundingly said no. Today we know that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan hastened the collapse of the Evil Empire, so some things that seem to make us worse off are not unmixed curses.

Take heart America, look on the bright side.  In Will's defense, there are any number of reasons to reject this particular political device.  I might say in the first place that McCain looks like a fool asking it, considering his the Republican candidate for President.  As Will points out, it's a fairly vague question, but I would say that's its rhetorical, not logical, appeal.  Here is, however, one reason not to reject it:

The people asking and those answering the "better off" question seem to assume that the only facts that matter are those that can be expressed as economic statistics. Statistics are fine as far as they go, but they do not go very far in measuring life as actually lived.

No one really assumes that economic facts are the only relevant ones.  And it also would be supremely  disingenuous to suggest the question ought to consider the accumulation of good memories:

Suppose in those years you read "Middlemarch," rediscovered Fred Astaire's movies, took up fly-fishing, saw Chartres and acquired grandchildren. Even if the value of your stock portfolio is down since 2004 (the Dow actually is up), are you not decidedly better off?

Sheez.  Most people hearing that question would assume its non of the asker's business whether they've had a good time in their personal life these past four years.  But what looked initially like straw man in its misrepresentation of the question, now turns into an excursus on the meaning of life, David Brooks style:

We do, unfortunately, live, as Edmund Burke lamented, in an age of "economists and calculators" who are eager to reduce all things to the dust of numeracy, neglecting what Burke called "the decent drapery of life." In this supposedly rational and scientific age, the thirst for simple metrics seduces people into a preoccupation with things that lend themselves to quantification.

Self-consciously "modern" people have an urge to reduce assessments of their lives to things that can be presented in tables, charts and graphs — personal and national economic statistics. This sharpens their minds by narrowing them. Such people might as well measure out their lives in coffee spoons.

So now if you care to consider your economic status now versus four years ago, you measure your life in coffee spoons?  Now it's a false dichotomy: you either consider your reading of Middlemarch, your grandchildren, and baseball fandom have made your life better (despite your home foreclosure and costs of medication), or you are an economic reductionist.  

David Brooks, Inexplicable, Michael Kinsley

This American life

Pundits rarely criticize each other by name.  So when they do, it's fun to point it out.  Here's Michael Kinsley on right wing sophistry  punditry re Sarah Palin, John McCain's pick for Vice President:

But that's so five minutes ago, before Sarah Palin. Already, conservative pundits have come up with creative explanations for McCain's choice of a vice presidential running mate with essentially no foreign policy experience. First prize (so far) goes to Michael Barone, who notes on the U.S. News and World Report blog that "Alaska is the only state with a border with Russia. And it is the only state with territory, in the Aleutian Islands, occupied by the enemy in World War II." I think we need to know what Sarah Palin has done, in her year and change as governor of Alaska, to protect the freedom of the Aleutian Islands before deciding how many foreign policy experience credits she deserves on their account. 

And here is the inexplicable David Brooks on the experience question:

So my worries about Palin are not (primarily) about her lack of experience. She seems like a marvelous person. She is a dazzling political performer. And she has experienced more of typical American life than either McCain or his opponent.

There's more to that but it brings up a family issue which no one should give a rats about.  I'm curious, however, how someone could experience more of a typical American life than someone else.  I suppose McCain's career in government and vast wealth and privilege would exclude him from the category of typical, but what about Obama?  Seems like his life–school on scholarship, etc.,–is fairly typical of a vast number Americans.  But besides, how would having an even more hyperbolically typical American life constitute a qualification for the most unique job in the country?

Update, I think this commenter on Crooked Timber aptly captures the issue (the comment regards Harriet Mier's nomination to the Supreme Court)–via Sadly, No!

Equivocation, John McCain

Poor in spirit

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Sorry McCain fan or fans, it's hard not to make fun of this:

“I define rich in other ways besides income,” he said. “Some people are wealthy and rich in their lives and their children and their ability to educate them. Others are poor if they’re billionaires.”

That may be.  When the question is tax policy (as it most certainly was) however, there's only one kind of rich that counts–the kind with 7 or 10 or more houses, and 270,000 a year on household staff expenses.

George Will, Other problems, Plain Bad Arguments

Unilateral multilateralism

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George Will has lately been a little more restrained, holding back his usual parade of straw men in favor of directionless overly written meditations on baseball or the lack of human progress.  Today he throws himself back into the thick of things with an analysis of what the very complicated situation in the Caucusus means for the US election.  What does it mean?  Well, it means that Obama is a sissy, and McCain is Mr.Tough guy. To be fair it doesn't seem that Will endorses McCain's attitude (it's unclear what Will's view is), but it is obvious that he ridicules Obama's.  He can, of course, ridicule Obama's position all he wants, but he should try to be more effective.  He writes:

On ABC's "This Week," Richardson, auditioning to be Barack Obama's running mate, disqualified himself. Clinging to the Obama campaign's talking points like a drunk to a lamppost, Richardson said that this crisis proves the wisdom of Obama's zest for diplomacy and that America should get the U.N. Security Council "to pass a strong resolution getting the Russians to show some restraint." Apparently Richardson was ambassador to the United Nations for 19 months without noticing that Russia has a Security Council veto.

This crisis illustrates, redundantly, the paralysis of the United Nations regarding major powers, hence regarding major events, and the fictitiousness of the European Union regarding foreign policy. Does this disturb Obama's serenity about the efficacy of diplomacy? Obama's second statement about the crisis, in which he tardily acknowledged Russia's invasion, underscored the folly of his first, which echoed the Bush administration's initial evenhandedness. "Now," said Obama, "is the time for Georgia and Russia to show restraint."

I think anyone can tell that Richardon's initial point (whatever may be its merits) is primarily a historical one (one about how things should have gone before this point).  Now that the US has exhausted itself on belligerent unilateralism, Russia is free to act as it wants–belligerently, as it turns out, and unilaterally.  What can the US do about it?  Not a lot (at least, not belligerently or unilaterally).  Now contrast this with McCain's rather different answer to a different question:    

John McCain, the "life is real, life is earnest" candidate, says he has looked into Putin's eyes and seen "a K, a G and a B." But McCain owes the thug thanks, as does America's electorate. Putin has abruptly pulled the presidential campaign up from preoccupation with plumbing the shallows of John Edwards and wondering what "catharsis" is "owed" to disappointed Clintonites.

McCain, who has called upon Russia "to immediately and unconditionally . . . withdraw all forces from sovereign Georgian territory," favors expelling Russia from the Group of Eight, and organizing a league of democracies to act where the United Nations is impotent, which is whenever the subject is important. But Georgia, whose desire for NATO membership had U.S. support, is not in NATO because some prospective members of McCain's league of democracies, e.g., Germany, thought that starting membership talks with Georgia would complicate the project of propitiating Russia. NATO is scheduled to review the question of Georgia's membership in December. Where now do Obama and McCain stand?

If Georgia were in NATO, would NATO now be at war with Russia? More likely, Russia would not be in Georgia. Only once in NATO's 59 years has the territory of a member been invaded — the British Falklands, by Argentina, in 1982.

Will is oblivious the obvious contradiction: what means will McCain use to achieve these ends?  What will convince NATO and the other members of the G-8 (as well as the non-yet-existent "league of democracies") to embrace his objectives?  Will it be diplomacy? 

It turns out, or so it seems to me, that for all the tough talk, McCain and Obama really agree on the fundamental importance of negotiation and diplomacy, they just may disagree on the means.

Gail Collins, Ruth Marcus, Unclassifiable

The people in your neighborhood

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Barack Obama and John McCain may be running for President, but Gail Collins is running for Maureen Dowd.  She writes,

Also, there was the problem of tone. McCain has sometimes been charged with sounding like a cranky neighbor yelling at kids to get off the lawn. This time, he turned into a cranky neighbor who hires you to cut his grass and then follows you around, pointing out blades that you missed.

And

While McCain was never violently opposed to offshore drilling, he has now embraced it as if it is not only the solution to our energy problems, but also the key to eternal salvation. Really, it’s a little scary. You can’t help wondering if he’s been captured by some kind of drilling cult.

And (continuing directly):

“We’re not going to pay $4 a gallon for gas because we’re going to drill offshore, and we’re going to drill now. We’re going to drill here. We’re going to drill now!” he told the bikers. McCain is not at his best when he’s trying to rally a large group of people. He pushes too hard and sometimes winds up sounding less enthusiastic than, um, loony. It was under this exact circumstance that he volunteered Cindy for the Miss Buffalo Chip contest, though I truly do not believe he knew about the topless part.

How silly.  In a similar vein, another of the grand liberal pundits, Ruth Marcus, musters her inner literary critic to discuss Obama's "pivot" (nice basketball metaphor) to populism: 

This turn to populism is not an extreme political makeover. Rather, it's a distinct tonal shift as the Democratic presidential candidate finishes a trip through three swing states — Michigan, Ohio and Indiana — where blue-collar voters aren't necessarily on board. Listen to Obama, and you hear the distant strains of Al Gore 2000: "the people versus the powerful." 

Whether there is something inauthentic about this "pivot" Marcus doesn't bother to say (and she gives no reason to think it is inauthentic other than the use of the word "shift").  But she devotes an entire column to the idea that there is a shift, which must be a part of some kind of inauthentic strategy, or some kind of pander:

Obama circled back to our conversation when a questioner at yesterday's town hall meeting asked why he singled out oil companies. This time his answer ventured beyond refinery capacity and widgets.

"So the question is, does it make more sense for the oil companies to pay for it or does it make more sense for the struggling waitress who is barely getting by to pay for it?" he said. "And the answer is, I'm going to fight for the waitress, not because I hate the oil companies but because I think it's more fair."

Also, waitresses vote.

Perhaps no one but a cynical newspaper columnist would pretend to be surprised by the "tonal shifts" in stump speeches versus interviews with cynical newspaper columnists.

Suppressed Evidence

Surge protector

27 Comments

I heard this on the radio and thought it didn't make any sense.  Even though it's a politician, I'll break with tradition (that's "tradition" by the way, not "rule") and put it up here.  And if you're addicted to "balance," then go find some crazy equivalent howler by Obama so we can talk about that.  It's John McCain criticizing Obama on the surge. 

Oddly enough, my opponent advocates the deployment of two new combat brigades to Afghanistan — in other words, a surge. We're left to wonder how he can deny that the surge in Iraq has succeeded, while at the same time announcing that a surge is just what we need in Afghanistan. I'll leave all these questions for my opponent and his team of 300 foreign policy advisors to work out for themselves. With luck, they'll get their story straight by the time the Obama campaign returns to North America.

The only way this argument would work is if Obama had argued that "surges" (I'm weak on military strategy, but I don't think that's a kind of thing) do not work in principle–which, as far as I know, he didn't. 

I guess I would call this a rather straightforward case of suppressed evidence.  Afghanistan and Iraq are obviously different vis a vis military surging.  Reasons for surging in one place are not reasons for surging in every place.  

Inexplicable, Richard Cohen

I ask myself

18 Comments

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.