Where have you been?

I think making you lose it is part of the design..

I don't think that conservative talking heads are alone in using these types of deception, but I do know that I go apoplectic when I hear them and generally forget and forsake my own intelligence. This makes me an ineffective respondent - of that there is no doubt.

Anyway, good piece from Brandon on Kos.


Foundations of Conservatism: Straw Man, Red Herring, and the Common Enemy
by BKuhl
Thu Jul 26, 2007 at 04:32:26 AM PDT

This is going to be a series. Many foundations of conservatism exist to deconstruct, so I’ll only tackle a few at a time. Today’s dose includes the Straw Man, the Red Herring, and the Common Enemy. It all appears in an article entitled “Why the Left Lies about Sex” by Kevin McCullough and posted at Townhall.com.

It starts thusly: “Liberals want your child to have sex.” This statement, to many people, is merely a lie. But it is actually much more involved than that. It is the center of a world-devouring black hole of bullshit.
BKuhl's diary :: ::

The statement, first and foremost, is a Straw Man argument. Republicans use these simulacra of reason all the time. A Straw Man is a sham argument set up to be defeated. To construct a Straw Man, just lie about your opponent’s argument to de-legitimate it.

It works in any argument. For instance, imagine we are debating whether to go ice skating. I am pro-ice skating. You respond, “You just want me to fall on the ice and break my ass!” This is bullshit, and it makes me seem like a total bastard. I could respond, “Yeah? Well, you just want to sit on your fat, indolent ass and work on your insulin resistance! You just want to beat the Guiness World Record for the laziest asshole alive!” Both would be straw men.

Back to “Liberals want your child to have sex.” God knows none of us gives a shit about the warped little Pharisee Pod People right wingers are cultivating in their gated gardens of hypocrisy (Note: I am a reformed pod). Nonetheless, dishonesty comes naturally to Kevin McCullough. Claiming that we liberals want their children to have sex is easier than debating us on the merits of our position.

Our real position: Instead of teaching children “abstinence only,” we should teach them “abstinence first.” Abstinence is the only way to avoid with confidence things like too-early pregnancy, infection, and the emotional parasites that accompany immature sex. But one should still know how to protect oneself for the almost certainly inevitable day when sex is appropriate, whether within marriage or otherwise.

See? That seems reasonable, right?

Of course, and it would have taken a hell of an effort by Mr. McCullough to challenge such a perspective. Lying was easier. The Straw Man is inevitable in right-wing discourse.

Now, on to the Red Herring: “For the first time since before President Clinton said what ‘is, is’ a majority of American teens...” You may be wondering, “What the hell does Clinton have to do with this?” This is the expected reaction of a rational mind. Cognitive processes halt for a second in stunned stupor. I call this the “WTF?!?-reaction.”

You have to complement the man, though, for the lyrical and philosophical contortion act required to pull off such a feat of imagination as to cram Bill Clinton’s promiscuity into such a thin attempt at argument. I applaud you, Kevin.

The accomplishment is one of distraction, the right-winger’s all-purpose instrument of influence. The Red Herring is an effort to mislead someone with an irrelevant assertion. It is named after the practice of using the scent of a fish to train hounds.

The Red Herring always seems relevant. For instance, in McCullough’s essay, talking about Clinton’s sexual impropriety sounds relevant to a discussion about government policy and sex.

But the argument is really about the credibility collapse of abstinence-only education as a policy. McCullough claims that the study unveiling this collapse is flawed because the kids in the study grew up during the “permissive” Clinton administration. I shit you not.

(Note: He also claims that the kids in the study didn’t really undergo abstinence-only education because the Bush era funding didn’t materialize until years after the study began. But abstinence-only education pre-existed federal funding for it, and unfortunately for McCullough, a quick read of WaPo’s article on the study reveals that, in fact, “slightly more than half of [the children in the study] also received abstinence-only education.” So, basically, McCullough made shit up, again.)

See? Does Clinton’s infidelity have anything to do with the worthiness of abstinence-only education? No. God, no. This is the kind of argument that makes sane men want to stab themselves in the eyes.

McCullough mentions that fewer children are choosing to have sex according to another study and actually tries to credit Bush with this success. The study never even tested the effects of abstinence-only education; it merely said that kids are having less sex. Kids can be having less sex while abstinence-only programs are failing, but one would think from reading ole' Kevin's article that the two are at mutually exclusive, opposite ends of the universe.

The study also showed that kids are using condoms more often, but McCullough bizarrely expresses dissatisfaction that news outlets mentioned this fact. Did Bush’s policies lead teens to use condoms? Would he deem such an increase in safe sex a success?

The two studies have nothing to do with one another, but McCullough distracted the reader with the Clinton Red Herring while he shifted to discussing this new study. See? Distract people long enough, and you can take them down any garden path you like.

A Red Herring is like pointing to the sky and screaming, “Look! An angel!” while stealing someone’s wallet. Mention something only tangentially related to the topic at hand when trying to change the subject in a losing argument or trying to cover a week spot, and few will notice.

It usually goes like this:
Liberal: “I think that we should build more wind farms to combat global warming.”
Right-winger: “Don’t you know that Ted Kennedy tried to stop an offshore wind farm from being built so he could protect his view of the ocean from his zillion-dollar palace?”
Liberal: “What the fuck? He did? What does that have to do with... ?”
Right-winger: “All liberals are the same. Hypocrites! Stupid liberals.”

This brings me to the final Foundation of Conservatism for now: The Common Enemy.

The Common Enemy Hypothesis is social psychology’s explanation for how a nationalist rip tide can sweep away the consciences of millions of people. All fascist movements contained at their cores a deep hatred of someone. This Common Enemy against which people rally to defeat may be the jews (Nazis), the blacks (the confederates), or, finally, the liberal (Republicans).

“The liberal” is not actually anything like real liberals that think and breath. It is a caricature. Lies such as “Liberals want your child to have sex” accumulate in the mind of the angry Republican to form a heaping pile of bullshit akin to a Straw Man but much easier to hate. The more bullshit one adds to the pile, the more it stinks.

The easier it is to hate the caricature the more united around that hatred they will be. This unity is a sick kind of power.

Republicans find ever-larger ways to make “the liberal” Common Enemy more nefarious. One such way is to pose Straw Men as discussed above. For instance, they claim that liberals hate America (instead of admitting that a capacity for truthful reflection upon one’s wrongs is an essential component of a conscience).

Another way is to find actual examples of the boogeyman one wants to create and use them as examples of the Common Enemy. For instance: Ward Churchill. He makes a stupid comment about 9/11 victims, and right-wingers frenzy around him like piranha. This is also called the Fallacy of Composition, which is to assume that what is true of a member of the group is true of the group as a whole (This is largely how things like racist and sexist ideas start).

The goal, though, is to make him a representative of liberals. When they burn useful idiots like Ward Churchill, they are burning all of us in effigy, even if we never agreed with a word the man spoke. The same thing happens to good liberals like Howard Dean, George Soros, the Clintons, Rosie O’Donnel, or Michael Moore. The right wing is looking for someone to hate by proxy. These people are temporary villains and will be replaced by the rest of us if such a opportunity ever comes within their reach.

What connects all of these ideological instruments is their usefulness at distracting people and circumventing their ability to think for themselves. Each is a distraction, and it is as good an explanation for why politics has been so bizarre during the last several years as anything.

Knowing these concepts will help any liberal counter right-wing propaganda. These concepts are our tools, and we can use them to retake the debate in America. The more people who know what we know about deceptive Republican tactics, the fewer people who fall for them.

Jon Stewart on the NIE report and more "circular logic"

Following up on the theme of "circular logic", here's Jon Stewart's take on the recent NIE report

That silly, old Constitution

There is a lot of chatter about impeachment these days in the ether. High crimes and misdemeanors and all that. I'm not really sure if the standard is met or not, but I thought it worth while to restate that particular part of the quaintness that is the U.S. Constitution. Article 2, Section IV:

"The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors, or for relentlessly brandishing illogic, or an absence of logic, or circular logic, before the exasperated body politic."

Wow... relentlessly brandishing illogic, or the absense of logic, or circular logic. Couldn't really be any clearer than that... it's like they knew these guys would show up eventually.

Saw a great piee from Adam Cohen in the NY Times this weekend about that same wacky group of guys that tried so hard to put something that would last in writing.


July 23, 2007
Editorial Observer
Just What the Founders Feared: An Imperial President Goes to War
By ADAM COHEN

The nation is heading toward a constitutional showdown over the Iraq war. Congress is moving closer to passing a bill to limit or end the war, but President Bush insists Congress doesn’t have the power to do it. “I don’t think Congress ought to be running the war,” he said at a recent press conference. “I think they ought to be funding the troops.” He added magnanimously: “I’m certainly interested in their opinion.”

The war is hardly the only area where the Bush administration is trying to expand its powers beyond all legal justification. But the danger of an imperial presidency is particularly great when a president takes the nation to war, something the founders understood well. In the looming showdown, the founders and the Constitution are firmly on Congress’s side.

Given how intent the president is on expanding his authority, it is startling to recall how the Constitution’s framers viewed presidential power. They were revolutionaries who detested kings, and their great concern when they established the United States was that they not accidentally create a kingdom. To guard against it, they sharply limited presidential authority, which Edmund Randolph, a Constitutional Convention delegate and the first attorney general, called “the foetus of monarchy.”

The founders were particularly wary of giving the president power over war. They were haunted by Europe’s history of conflicts started by self-aggrandizing kings. John Jay, the first chief justice of the United States, noted in Federalist No. 4 that “absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for the purposes and objects merely personal.”

Many critics of the Iraq war are reluctant to suggest that President Bush went into it in anything but good faith. But James Madison, widely known as the father of the Constitution, might have been more skeptical. “In war, the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed,” he warned. “It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered; and it is the executive brow they are to encircle.”

When they drafted the Constitution, Madison and his colleagues wrote their skepticism into the text. In Britain, the king had the authority to declare war, and raise and support armies, among other war powers. The framers expressly rejected this model and gave these powers not to the president, but to Congress.

The Constitution does make the president “commander in chief,” a title President Bush often invokes. But it does not have the sweeping meaning he suggests. The framers took it from the British military, which used it to denote the highest-ranking official in a theater of battle. Alexander Hamilton emphasized in Federalist No. 69 that the president would be “nothing more” than “first general and admiral,” responsible for “command and direction” of military forces.

The founders would have been astonished by President Bush’s assertion that Congress should simply write him blank checks for war. They gave Congress the power of the purse so it would have leverage to force the president to execute their laws properly. Madison described Congress’s control over spending as “the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.”

The framers expected Congress to keep the president on an especially short leash on military matters. The Constitution authorizes Congress to appropriate money for an army, but prohibits appropriations for longer than two years. Hamilton explained that the limitation prevented Congress from vesting “in the executive department permanent funds for the support of an army, if they were even incautious enough to be willing to repose in it so improper a confidence.”

As opinion turns more decisively against the war, the administration is becoming ever more dismissive of Congress’s role. Last week, Under Secretary of Defense Eric Edelman brusquely turned away Senator Hillary Clinton’s questions about how the Pentagon intended to plan for withdrawal from Iraq. "Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq,” he wrote. Mr. Edelman’s response showed contempt not merely for Congress, but for the system of government the founders carefully created.

The Constitution cannot enforce itself. It is, as the constitutional scholar Edwin Corwin famously observed, an “invitation to struggle” among the branches, but the founders wisely bequeathed to Congress some powerful tools for engaging in the struggle. It is no surprise that the current debate over a deeply unpopular war is arising in the context of a Congressional spending bill. That is precisely what the founders intended.

Members of Congress should not be intimidated into thinking that they are overstepping their constitutional bounds. If the founders were looking on now, it is not Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi who would strike them as out of line, but George W. Bush, who would seem less like a president than a king.