{"id":643,"date":"2008-04-14T08:54:51","date_gmt":"2008-04-14T12:54:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=643"},"modified":"2008-04-14T15:57:04","modified_gmt":"2008-04-14T19:57:04","slug":"crystal-balls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=643","title":{"rendered":"Crystal balls"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like his colleague David Brooks at the New York Times, William Kristol<\/a> has been pretty much wrong about everything in the past several years (and probably before).  But wrongness, when it happens, just doesn’t happen.  There’s always a reason for it.  So I believe now, at least.<\/p>\n

I’m not going to explain <\/strong>the wrongness of William Kristol–he’s wedded to an incoherent ideology, for instance.  I don’t know if that’s true, and besides I don’t have access to Kristol’s mental states.  So if  you read this and you’re a conservative, notice that I haven’t said "conservatives are wrong in their core beliefs."  Wrongness always happens in the particulars.  <\/p>\n

I’m interested in the wrongness of his reasons.  To that end, let’s take a look at one or two.  In today’s column, he opposes the following claims:<\/p>\n

\n

But it\u2019s one thing for a German thinker to assert that \u201creligion is
\nthe sigh of the oppressed creature.\u201d It\u2019s another thing for an American
\npresidential candidate to claim that we \u201ccling to … religion\u201d out of
\neconomic frustration.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s a particularly odd claim for
\nBarack Obama to make. After all, in his speech at the 2004 Democratic
\nconvention, he emphasized with pride that blue-state Americans, too,
\n\u201cworship an awesome God.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That’s obviously not <\/strong>a contradiction or some kind of less rigorous "tension" or "inconsistency."  As explanations go, Obama’s seems fairly innocuous.  He’s clearly talking about a certain motivation for religion as distinct from say, God, the object of those religions.  Attacking this weak version of Obama’s remarks is what you might call a "straw man."
A little charity on Kristol’s part would help him see this.  But I ask perhaps too much.<\/p>\n

Here’s another: <\/p>\n

\n

Then there\u2019s what Obama calls \u201canti-immigrant sentiment.\u201d Has Obama
\ndone anything to address it? It was John McCain, not Obama, who took
\npolitical risks to try to resolve the issue of illegal immigration by
\nputting his weight behind an attempt at immigration reform.<\/p>\n

\nFurthermore, some concerns about unchecked and unmonitored illegal
\nimmigration<\/strong> are surely legitimate. Obama voted in 2006 (to take just
\none example) for the Secure Fence Act, which was intended to control
\nthe Mexican border through various means, including hundreds of miles
\nof border fence. Was Obama then just accommodating bigotry?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Anyone ought to be able to see the difference between criticizing "anti-immigrant sentiment" (which applies to both legal and  immigrants) fomented by Kristol’s partners on the right and supporting "unchecked <\/strong>and unmonitored <\/strong>illegal immigration."   Being against the latter, of course, doesn’t make you for the former.  This amounts to, I think, a kind of red herring.  Concern about "Illegal immigration" bears only a slight resemblance to "anti-immigrant sentiment" of the "bigotry" variety.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like his colleague David Brooks at the New York Times, William Kristol has been pretty much wrong about everything in the past several years (and probably before).  But wrongness, when it happens, just doesn’t happen.  There’s always a reason for it.  So I believe now, at least. I’m not going to explain the wrongness of … Continue reading Crystal balls<\/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":[9,29,12,56],"tags":[127,108,111,1985],"class_list":["post-643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-false-dichotomy","category-red-herring","category-straw-man","category-william-kristol","tag-immigration","tag-obama","tag-religion","tag-william-kristol"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643","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=643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}