{"id":55,"date":"2004-09-27T10:46:44","date_gmt":"2004-09-27T14:46:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=55"},"modified":"2005-02-12T18:04:34","modified_gmt":"2005-02-12T22:04:34","slug":"if-it-walks-like-a-duck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=55","title":{"rendered":"If it walks like a duck"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today I\u2019d like briefly to add a few more wrinkles to my colleague\u2019s<\/a> very clear and perhaps overly charitable analysis of Charles Krauthammer\u2019s<\/a> abominable and wildly fallacious op-ed of last Friday. In particular, I would like to discuss Krauthammer\u2019s rather devious attempt to identify John Kerry with the terrorists in virtue of the fact that they can be construed to share vaguely similar objectives. While such a strategy often results in the more obviously fallacious ad hominem<\/em> argument, the frequency of its employment in recent political discourse, and its outrageously erroneous logical structure, warrants a separate discussion.<\/p>\n

How does Krauthammer go about this? First he needs to find common ground for Kerry and the terrorists. To this end, after pointing out that two recent terrorist attacks aimed at allies of the U.S. invasion of Iraq (specifically Australia and Spain) seemed geared toward undermining support among coalition members, Krauthammer makes the following startling observation:<\/p>\n

\n

That [Abandon America and buy your safety] is what the terrorists are saying. Why is the Kerry campaign saying the same thing? “John Kerry’s campaign has warned Australians that the Howard Government’s support for the US in Iraq has made them a bigger target for international terrorists.” So reports the Weekend Australian (Sept. 18).<\/p>\n

Americans Overseas for Kerry is the Kerry operation for winning the crucial votes of Americans living abroad (remember the Florida recount?), including more than 100,000 who live in Australia. Its leader was interviewed Sept. 16 by The Australian’s Washington correspondent, Roy Eccleston. Asked if she believed the terrorist threat to Australians was now greater because of the support for President Bush<\/em>, she replied: “I would have to say that,” noting that “[t]he most recent attack was on the Australian embassy in Jakarta.”<\/p>\n

She said this of her country (and of the war that Australia is helping us with in Iraq): “[W]e are endangering the Australians now by this wanton disregard for international law and multilateral channels.” Mark Latham could not have said it better. Nor could Jemaah Islamiah, the al Qaeda affiliate that killed nine people in the Jakarta bombing.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

First of all, the conclusion (which appears in the first paragraph), \u201cthe Kerry campaign is saying the same thing,\u201d raises logical eyebrows of its own. For just what is \u201cthe same thing\u201d? If it means that the U.S. has erred in invading Iraq, then lots of people (many of them not terrorists) are saying that. If he means that countries who continue to support U.S. policy in Iraq are more likely targets for terrorists, then, again, lots of non-terrorists are saying that. In addition, that is an observation well supported by the evidence (take Jakarta and Madrid, for instance), and not, as Krauthammer might be taken to suggest, a threat on Kerry\u2019s part (for more on that see Friday\u2019s post). So the Kerry campaign, on the analysis of this particular op-ed, is alleging (and correctly too, if we are to take Krauthammer\u2019s own claims about the Madrid and Jakarta bombings as true) that the invasion of Iraq has done more to foment terrorism than end it.<\/p>\n

But whether or not Kerry is or is not saying the same (or a substantially similar) thing as the terrorists is beside the point. Why don\u2019t we, for the sake of argument, suppose that to be the case. If we do, we can unveil the more subtle (for Krauthammer avoids directly stating it) but nonetheless devious identification of the Kerry campaign and the terrorists. This identification occurs in two different places in the passage just quoted.<\/p>\n

First, there is the obvious \u201cthe Kerry campaign is saying the same thing.\u201d And second, we have the less overt, but more pernicious, \u201cMark Latham [and Jemaah Islamiah] could not have said it better.\u201d In the second instance, the real terrorists may be offended that \u201cdisregard for international law and multilateral channels\u201d is being attributed to them as a justification for their terrorism. But never mind that terrorists rarely if ever have such legalistic motives, for Krauthammer\u2019s obvious intention here is to identify the Kerry campaign in some rhetorically underhanded way with terrorists; after all, they both say the same thing<\/em>. Aside from being just plain false (or too vague), this claim depends on an absolutely specious inference from accidental property to substantial identity. <\/p>\n

Let\u2019s illustrate this distinction with a counterexample. Both Bush and Bin Laden consider Saddam Hussein to be their enemy. And let\u2019s say that they even say similar things about him. We should hardly be justified in concluding that their agreement on Saddam is anything more than purely coincidental (they dislike Hussein for radically different reasons). If this is not the case, then, in Krauthammer\u2019s eyes, Bush has a lot of explaining to do. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today I\u2019d like briefly to add a few more wrinkles to my<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,2,13,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-krauthammer","category-op-ed-writers","category-plain-bad-arguments","category-straw-man"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55","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=55"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}