{"id":534,"date":"2007-12-29T10:23:31","date_gmt":"2007-12-29T14:23:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=534"},"modified":"2007-12-29T10:28:43","modified_gmt":"2007-12-29T14:28:43","slug":"annus-horribilis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=534","title":{"rendered":"Annus horribilis"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Washington Post listed their 10 most viewed opinions<\/a> of the year.  A couple were by Dan Froomkin<\/a>.  The winner was, however, an article by Liz, daughter of the VP, Cheney<\/a> (in the original op-ed, she was not identified as his daughter<\/a>–which, if you follow the link, led to rather silly slippery slope arguments by the perpetually permalosa Post Ombudsman, Deborah Howell.  To its rare credit, the Post doesn't make any claims about the quality of the top ten.  Nor should they.  Here's just a sample of Cheney's razor sharp mind:<\/p>\n

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· We are at war<\/em>. America faces an existential threat. This is not, as Speaker Nancy Pelosi has claimed, a "situation to be solved." It would be nice if we could wake up tomorrow and say, as Sen. Barack Obama suggested at a Jan. 11 hearing, "Enough is enough." Wishing doesn't make it so. We will have to fight these terrorists to the death somewhere, sometime. We can't negotiate with them or "solve" their jihad. If we quit in Iraq now, we must get ready for a harder, longer, more deadly struggle later.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

As one of my grad profs (rightly) said (to me): italicizing doesn't make it any clearer.  The rest of the paragraph just runs together any number of basic logical fallacies–straw man, equivocation, false dichotomy, false cause, and so on.  For a good year end laugh at Cheney's expense–read the rest.<\/p>\n

Happy New Year to all. <\/p>\n

**After writing this, I realized I had mentioned this article before<\/a>, but this is all I had to say about it:<\/p>\n

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It’s hard to have a conversation about the foolishness of ever having started the war in Iraq without running into people who accuse you of not wanting to win. I suppose they (probably purposely) confuse you’re believing you’re right about an unwinnable war with your wishing reality would conform to your beliefs<\/a>. You–the opposer of the Iraq war–think rather that your belief corresponds in some philosophically uninteresting way with reality–not t’other way round. Such a basic confusion is the only explanation behind Liz Cheney’s guest op-ed in the Washington Post<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I'd say the same thing again today.  <\/p>\n

Happy New Year again to everyone. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Washington Post listed their 10 most viewed opinions of the year.  A couple were by Dan Froomkin.  The winner was, however, an article by Liz, daughter of the VP, Cheney (in the original op-ed, she was not identified as his daughter–which, if you follow the link, led to rather silly slippery slope arguments by … Continue reading Annus horribilis<\/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":[11,21,9,3,22,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-equivocation","category-false-cause","category-false-dichotomy","category-politicians","category-slippery-slope","category-straw-man"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534","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=534"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}