Among the hundreds of thousands of student victims of the whims of the all powerful teachers\u2019 union, all students of Logic 101 have been subjected to the following counterintuitive stipulation: \u201csome\u201d is a quantifier; it tells you how many. But how many does \u201csome\u201d mean? Well, and here\u2019s the counterintuitive part, it means *at least one*\u2013not necessarily more than just one. Those same students, those victims of the powerful agents of a government-sponsored Democratic political lobby, also know that \u201csome\u201d is infinitely distant from \u201call.\u201d So when some use some it may mean only some, that is, one. <\/p>\n
That said, in today\u2019s *Washington Post* George Will<\/a> Now of course on the other hand we are only talking about *some* of the rage. So that\u2019s a pretty low bar to hurdle. But the unspecified quantum of rage doesn\u2019t constitute the worst feature of Will\u2019s argument today. It\u2019s the fact that he pits *some* of the motivation for the \u201crage\u201d of *some* Democrats against the policies of the current administration (not a \u201csome,\u201d but an \u201call\u201d); this specious comparison juxtaposes the selfish and shortsighted Democratic motivations with principled Republican stands on policy. *Some* of the Democrats\u2019 rage results from the gutting of their base that would happen under the policies of a new Bush administration. Take the worst of the selfish and shortsighted Democratic base (and the one which for completely selfish reasons is closest to our heart) for example, the teachers\u2019 union:<\/p>\n The public education lobby — one in 10 delegates to the Democratic convention was a member of a teachers union — wants government to keep impediments in the way of competition. That means not empowering parents with school choice, including the choice of private schools, which have significantly lower per-pupil costs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Here\u2013and throughout the rest of the piece\u2013Will compares the ruinous and obtusely self-serving motives of the Democratic base with the reasoned stands of the Republican party. The Democrats, of course, want only to continue to exist and further their own self-interest. The Republican platform, on the other hand, is characterized here by the apparent soundness of its policy and the purity of its motivations. One more example:<\/p>\n Welfare reform, the largest legislative achievement of the 1990s, diminished the Democratic Party’s dependency-bureaucracy complex. That complex consists of wards of government and their government supervisors. And Bush’s “ownership society” is another step in the plan to reduce the supply of government by reducing the demand for it.<\/p>\n That felicitous formulation, from Jonathan Rauch’s masterful analysis of Bush’s domestic ambitions (National Journal, July 26, 2003), follows from two axioms of which conservatives are fond: Give a person a fish and you give the person a meal; teach the person to fish and you give a livelihood. And: No one washes a rental car. Meaning people behave most responsibly about what they own. Hence Bush’s menu of incentives for private retirement, health, education and savings accounts.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Here again the policies of the Bush administration clash with the entirely political motivations of Democratic operatives. But, as we have argued here before, for comparisons to work, the items compared must be of the same category. So Will should either compare the selfish motives of the Republican party with the selfish motives of the Democratic party, or the policies of the one with the policies of the other. Now of course in the end just because there might in fact be *some* Democrats who fit Will\u2019s description doesn\u2019t make his comparison any less specious. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Among the hundreds of thousands of student victims of the whims of the all powerful teachers\u2019 union, all students of Logic 101 have been subjected to the following counterintuitive stipulation: \u201csome\u201d is a quantifier; it tells you how many. But how many does \u201csome\u201d mean? Well, and here\u2019s the counterintuitive part, it means *at least … Continue reading Will to compare<\/span>
\nattempts to \u201cunderstand some of the Democratic rage about the specter of a second term for George W. Bush.\u201d In turns out that the \u201csome\u201d here refers not to an unspecified number of Democrats, but rather to an undetermined quantum of their motivation for fearing a second term of George Bush. In case you thought that this undetermined quantum of rage was directed at profound or even superficial concerns over the domestic policies of the current administration, you\u2019d be sorely disappointed. For Will\u2019s analysis concerns the political survival of the Democratic party as an entity, not, as it might seem, the agenda of the Democratic party; if Bush gets reelected, Will muses, then his policies might produce fewer Democrats.<\/p>\n\n