{"id":479,"date":"2007-09-21T07:43:02","date_gmt":"2007-09-21T11:43:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=479"},"modified":"2007-09-21T08:22:45","modified_gmt":"2007-09-21T12:22:45","slug":"strategic-incite","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=479","title":{"rendered":"Strategic incite"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hard to believe people still say certain things with a straight face. But Michael Gerson’s<\/a> previous job consisted in the nearly impossible task of putting words in President Bush’s mouth: the words that went in were abhorrent; the words that came out were nonsense. <\/p>\n

>President Bush’s emphasis on democracy has been driven not by outside pressure but by a strategic insight<\/strong>. He is convinced that the status quo of tyranny, stagnation and extremism in the Middle East is not sustainable — that the rage and ideologies it produces will cause increasing carnage in the world<\/strong>. The eventual solution to this problem, in his view, is the proliferation of hopeful, representative societies in the Middle East.<\/p>\n

Just for the record–“insight” is what you call an “achievement verb.” It indicates that the person has been successful at creative ideation. All signs point to no at this point. You can’t be insightful if you don’t see anything.<\/p>\n

Of course, Gerson seems to know that, so he continues:<\/p>\n

>This argument is debatable. But it is at least as likely as Walt and Mearsheimer’s naive belief that “the U.S. has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel” — the equivalent of arguing<\/strong> that Britain had a Nazi problem in the 1930s because it was so closely allied with Czechoslovakia.<\/p>\n

Holy weak analogies!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hard to believe people still say certain things with a straight face. But Michael Gerson’s previous job consisted in the nearly impossible task of putting words in President Bush’s mouth: the words that went in were abhorrent; the words that came out were nonsense. >President Bush’s emphasis on democracy has been driven not by outside … Continue reading Strategic incite<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59,72,12,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-category-mistake","category-michael-gerson","category-straw-man","category-weak-analogy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}