Tag Archives: David Broder

David Broder, Ignoratio Elenchi

Economic stimulus

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Economic stimulus, David Broder style:

Can Obama harness the forces that might spur new growth? This is the key question for the next two years.

What are those forces? Essentially, there are two. One is the power of the business cycle, the tidal force that throughout history has dictated when the economy expands and when it contracts.

Economists struggle to analyze this, but they almost inevitably conclude that it cannot be rushed and almost resists political command. As the saying goes, the market will go where it is going to go.

In this regard, Obama has no advantage over any other pol. Even in analyzing the tidal force correctly, he cannot control it.

What else might affect the economy? The answer is obvious, but its implications are frightening. War and peace influence the economy.

Look back at FDR and the Great Depression. What finally resolved that economic crisis? World War II.

Here is where Obama is likely to prevail. With strong Republican support in Congress for challenging Iran's ambition to become a nuclear power, he can spend much of 2011 and 2012 orchestrating a showdown with the mullahs. This will help him politically because the opposition party will be urging him on. And as tensions rise and we accelerate preparations for war, the economy will improve.

I am not suggesting, of course, that the president incite a war to get reelected. But the nation will rally around Obama because Iran is the greatest threat to the world in the young century. If he can confront this threat and contain Iran's nuclear ambitions, he will have made the world safer and may be regarded as one of the most successful presidents in history.

Is he suggesting Obama start a war in order to stimulate the economy?  Aren't there other things we can blow our money on?

ignorance of basic matters of logic, Michael Gerson

The ugly party

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A brief follow up to yesterday's post on Michael Gerson.  He laments the harsh words used in private correspodence for (ugly) people.  If that wasn't dumb enough already (and hypocritical, as Aaron in comments points out–see here) what's funny is his vision of the alternative.  Here is how he describes it:

The alternative to the Ugly Party is the Grown-Up Party — less edgy and less hip. It is sometimes depicted on the left and on the right as an all-powerful media establishment, stifling creativity, freedom and dissent. The Grown-Up Party, in my experience, is more like a seminar at the Aspen Institute — presentation by David Broder, responses from E.J. Dionne Jr. and David Brooks — on the electoral implications of the energy debate. I am more comfortable in this party for a few reasons: because it is more responsible, more reliable and less likely to wish its opponents would die.

The grown up party isn't engaged in the same kind of discussion as the "ugly party."  For all its faults, the ugly party is at least doing what one ought to be doing in politics–i.e., arguing about stuff.  Some of them may be doing it badly, and I suppose that this is the point of our whole web empire here at TheNonSequitur, but at least they're doing it.  By contrast, by Gerson's description, the grown up party isn't really doing argument–they're doing analysis.  The electoral implications of the engery policy debate might be interesting, but they don't resolve what the policy ought to be.  As Gerson has it, that is a question for the Ugly party, and I say, therefore, I think I want to be a member of the Ugly party. 

David Broder, Plain Bad Arguments, Unqualified Authority

Does David Broder read the Washington Post?

Two short points today. We’re still working out the kinks here.

First, my view is that we ought to redo our health care system. I think this is a matter of national security, much more say than the imaginary weapons of a fictional dictator. People here actually die from lack of adequate health care. Now, since it’s a matter of national security, and since we continue to pay richly for imaginary threats to our national security, we ought to not complain about things that are real. This is why this kind of stuff from David Broder) raises one’s blood pressure:

Acknowledging that “clearly, we need radical reconstructive surgery to make our health-care system effective, affordable and sustainable,” Walker cautioned that “what we should not do is merely tack new programs onto a system that is fundamentally flawed” — and rapidly driving the national budget into ruin.

He proposes a four-part test of fiscal responsibility for any health reform plan: “First, the reform should pay for itself over 10 years. Second, it should not add to deficits beyond 10 years. Third, it should significantly reduce the tens of trillions of dollars in unfunded health promises that we already have. Fourth, it should bend down — not up — the total health-care cost curve as a percentage of” gross domestic product.

If only people had made this argument about Iraq and Afghanistan.

Next point, the Lewin group is an insurance company-funded group. One ought not to cite them as independent and impartial observers. Following directly from the above:

An analysis by the Lewin Group shows that the Energy and Commerce Committee bill that was the basic blueprint for the House measure comes close to meeting the first of those tests and fails the other three, according to Walker, “by a wide margin.”

A separate Lewin Group study of the Finance Committee bill from which Majority Leader Harry Reid is working on the Senate legislation shows it is almost as much of a fiscal failure. It fails the fourth test, falls short on the third, and passes the first two only by assuming that future Congresses will force reductions in reimbursements to doctors and hospitals that lawmakers in the past have refused to impose.

Here is the Washington Post on the Lewin group on 7.23/2009:

Generally left unsaid amid all the citations is that the Lewin Group is wholly owned by UnitedHealth Group, one of the nation’s largest insurers.

Doesn’t Broder read his own paper?

Ad hominem circumstantial, David Broder, Ignoratio Elenchi

Boiling of the blood around the heart

There is a fairly simple argument for exploring the possibility of criminal trials against those who justified, ordered and performed torture: torture is illegal.  David Broder, however, seems very confused about the nature of legality.  He writes:

But now Obama is being lobbied by politicians and voters who want something more — the humiliation and/or punishment of those responsible for the policies of the past. They are looking for individual scalps — or, at least, careers and reputations.

Their argument is that without identifying and punishing the perpetrators, there can be no accountability — and therefore no deterrent lesson for future administrations. It is a plausible-sounding rationale, but it cloaks an unworthy desire for vengeance.

Holy crap is that silly.  Vengeance is irrelevant to whether or not someone has broken laws.  Let's say, for the sake of argument, people have broken the law.  The people who trusted them with their vote (and those who didn't vote for them, but implicitly "trusted" them anyway) have a right to be rather narked (I don't know how to spell that Britishism properly) about their violating that trust.  There being angry about it, however, is an independent, mostly irrelevant, fact about their character used ad hominemly to distract the reader from drawing the correct conclusion.

It's about as irrelevant as the following:

The memos on torture represented a deliberate, and internally well-debated, policy decision, made in the proper places — the White House, the intelligence agencies and the Justice Department — by the proper officials.

One administration later, a different group of individuals occupying the same offices has — thankfully — made the opposite decision. Do they now go back and investigate or indict their predecessors?

That way, inevitably, lies endless political warfare. It would set the precedent for turning all future policy disagreements into political or criminal vendettas. That way lies untold bitterness — and injustice.

The question is not whether the torture decision was a policy decision–we all know that it was–the question is whether that policy decision was legal.  Just because the right people sat in a room and debated it doesn't mean it's just politics.  It only makes the crime (should there be determined to be one) worse.    

David Broder, Unclassifiable

Foul deeds and words

Rod Blagojevich, the embattled Illinois Governor whose name everyone now knows how to pronounce incorrectly, has been seen on some 20 or so talk shows lately.  This is odd in the first place because his name is hard to pronounce, but in the second place he's undergoing impeachment right now.  Well, maybe it's not really odd.  It seems to me he has given up on any chance of not being impeached, so he's concentrating his efforts on the forthcoming criminal trial.  Whatever his purpose or strategy, he has never been convicted of any crime.  Someone should tell David Broder, punditorum praefectus, who cannot believe his colleagues would talk to a person such as Blagojevich.  He writes:

But even as Blagojevich has abandoned any pretense of mounting a legal defense of his actions, he has launched a full-scale public relations campaign, hitting the morning talk-show circuit to parade his impudence under the guise of proclaiming his innocence.

It's as if there were no bill of particulars filed against him and approved almost unanimously by the members of the Illinois House of Representatives, who have endured six years of his misgovernment.

By simply asserting the claim that the state Senate trial on those charges is a "witch hunt," Blagojevich has tried to duck responsibility for his foul words and deeds while cloaking himself in phony martyrdom.

When Blagojevich was interviewed on TV and cable networks, the first — and maybe only — question should have been: "Why the hell are you here in our studio instead of where you belong: testifying under oath in the Senate trial in Springfield?"

Instead, he was allowed to charge, falsely, that the rules of the trial prevented him from calling defense witnesses or making his own case.

To my chagrin, the PR offensive seems to be working, not only with TV talkers who often confuse celebrity with more serious attributes, but with journalists who ought to know better.

Pardon my being direct, but what a numbskull–Broder I mean. (1) Blagojevich is going to proclaim his innocence (guilty people sometimes do); (2) they will pretend there are no credible charges against them; (3) they will claim the trial is politically motivated; (4) they have a right not to incriminate themselves so they don't have to testify or even show up; (4) people are allowed to lie constantly on TV (cf. ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, MSNBC, CNN, CNBC, ESPN); (5) the blame for believing Blagojevich falls on those who believe him, if he's lying.

Most of all, however, Blagojevich has been accused of foul deeds, despite David Broder's prudishness, it's not illegal to use foul words.

 

David Broder, Inexplicable, Lack of Evidence

Fine

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Where I come from–Liberal Academia–debates are won by the party who has (1) the better command of the facts; (2) the better argument.  Where David Broder lives, Washington D.C., such liberal, post-modern notions as facts and argument matter not.  

Palin did just fine on her own, and so did Joe Biden, her sparring partner and the veteran senator from Delaware. In fact, the surprise of the night was that the candidates for the No. 2 job were much livelier and more impressive on the Washington University stage than Barack Obama and McCain had been when they met at Ole Miss.

In a session that was faster-paced and friendlier than the presidential debate, Palin and Biden smiled often at each other while exchanging glances and verbal blows. It was a reminder that politics can be fun — as well as informative.

But it created a mystery of its own. Why in the world has the McCain campaign kept Palin under wraps from her debut at the Republican National Convention until this debate? What were they afraid of?

I asked that question of Steve Schmidt, the McCain campaign manager, and he disputed the premise. Schmidt said that Palin has answered "hundreds" of questions — which will come as news to the reporters who have been traipsing around the country with her. Going into the debate, she had done exactly three television interviews — with ABC, CBS and Fox — and not held a single news conference.

It doesn't appear Broder even watched the debate.  It's one thing to assert that Palin did fine in the debate, followed by (1) a new definition of "fine" and (2) evidence that it applies to her performance in St.Louis.  It's rather another thing simply to state as settled fact that she did fine and then mysteriously wonder why the McCain camp worried about her in the first place.  As anyone who saw those interviews knows, they worried about her because when pressed, it becomes clear she doesn't know anything about anything and, more importantly, she can't even fake it when pressed.

David Broder, Lack of Evidence

Argumentum ad linguam

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David Broder reviews a conservative think tanks' "admirably well written and well researched" pamphlet about whether "whether America's national identity is eroding under the pressure of population diversity and educational slackness."  Broder, in his oddly positive review of this pamphlet, fails to see the irony in the following two claims.

First,

And so, the Bradley scholars say, "knowing what America stands for is not a genetic inheritance. It must be learned, both by the next generation and by those who come to this country. In this way, a nation founded on an idea is inherently fragile." 

And,

When it comes to the treatment of immigrants, the Bradley team sees a real threat in such things as multilingual ballots and bilingual classes. Such accommodations to the growing diversity of the population could lead to "many Americas, or even no America at all," they maintain. "Historical ignorance, civic neglect and social fragmentation might achieve what a foreign invader could not." 

Seems to me the authors are disturbed by the mechanisms of greater civic knowledge and participation.  Besides, if I remember my history rightly, both of the belligerents in American Civil War spoke English.

David Broder

Anti-intellectual punditry

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David Broder seems surprised–and informed–by the claim of a recent book (Elvin T. Lim's, The Anti-Intellectual Presidency) that there is a notable absence of "logical argument" in presidential politics.  He writes:

In a slim book titled "The Anti-Intellectual Presidency," [Lim] argues that the real problem is not the increased quantity of words coming out of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. but the sharp decline in content — especially of logical argument.

While I'm not surprised that Broder is surprised (Bush is staged for a comeback!), it's a disappointing reminder of rather low quality of critical thought in the political press (compared in one recent and blistering article to the courtiers of Versailles).  In an ideal world, Lim's thesis would be the job description of the pundit class and the everyday content of the op-ed page.  But no.