Stygius

Punctuation mark reductionism

I was among those appalled that when President Bush, on CNN, outrageously reduced the death and suffering in Iraq to a punctuation mark:

Admittedly, it seems like a decade ago. I like to tell people when the final history is written on Iraq, it will look like just a comma because there is — my point is, there’s a strong will for democracy. (emphasis added)

Now, Ian Welsh fills us in on the dog whistle:

The phrase is: "Never put a period where God has put a comma." Which is to say - it ain't over yet, and God may well make it better. So Iraq's bad, but if we trust in God, he'll make it better.

This is the thing about Bush - he is constantly littering his speeches with code words and phrases meant for the religious right. Other people don't hear them, but they do, and most of the time it allows Bush both to say what those who aren't evangelical or born again want to hear, while still reassuring the religious right wants to hear.

Framing framing

Somehow, I haven't been able to get past the introductory abstract of this Lakoff piece to discover the joys of "deep framing":

Other critics have misframed framing and attacked us for engaging in it.

This appears to be one of those occasions when someone erects a concept, and then worships it as an independent and universal constant, utterly ignoring their own role in erecting the thing in the first place. That's the only way I can make sense of this gibberish. Besides, is "misframing" even a logical concept? If it frames framing (or whatever) in a successful way, then that is merely framing.

This leads to the vicious regresses and intellectual incestuousness -- and ultimately the practical  irrelevance -- implied by the above claim.

In their dry cellar

Eric Martin provides a succinct round-up of the hollow men, "Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!"

More values than you?

I have to agree with George Will on this one:

An aggressively annoying new phrase in America's political lexicon is "values voters." It is used proudly by social conservatives, and carelessly by the media to denote such conservatives.

This phrase diminishes our understanding of politics. It also is arrogant on the part of social conservatives and insulting to everyone else because it implies that only social conservatives vote to advance their values and everyone else votes to . . . well, it is unclear what they supposedly think they are doing with their ballots.

What Will finds "odd" is simply a not-so-new twist on chauvinistic politics: For whatever reason, some people really need to think they are better than others. And a large and powerful network of "values" organizations like Family Research Council and the Traditional Values Coalition function to promote and pander to such sentiments.

Conservatives should be wary of the idea that when they talk about, say, tax cuts and limited government -- about things other than abortion, gay marriage, religion in the public square and similar issues -- they are engaging in values-free discourse. And by ratifying the social conservatives' monopoly of the label "values voters," the media are furthering the fiction that these voters are somehow more morally awake than others.

The voodoo's got no mojo

The claim that lower taxes are increasing revenues overall? In other words, are tax cuts self-financing? Better yet, do they pay for themselves? Sebastian Mallaby:

Nobody serious believes that tax cuts pay for themselves, as I noted last week. But most senior Republicans flunk this test of seriousness.

In January, George W. Bush declared that, "by cutting the taxes on the American people, this economy is strong, and the overall tax revenues have hit at record levels." Regrettably, this endorsement of what his dad called voodoo economics was not a one-time oversight. The next month, Bush told a New Hampshire audience, "You cut taxes and the tax revenues increase."

Yet the administration's own economists' contradict the wishful thinking:

Mankiw is a top-notch economist hired by Bush and Cheney to advise them. And last year he published a paper [PDF] on how far tax cuts pay for themselves, reporting enthusiastically that this self-financing effect is "surprisingly large."

How large, exactly? Mankiw reckons that over the long run (the long run being generous to his argument), cuts on capital taxes generate enough extra growth to pay for half of the lost revenue. Hello, Mr. President, that means that the other half of the lost revenue translates into bigger deficits. Mankiw also calculates that the comparable figure for cuts in taxes on wages is 17 percent. Yes, Mr. President, that means every $1 trillion in tax cuts is going to add $830 billion to the national debt.

"Voodoo" economics? More like "hoodoo voodoo, chooka-chooky-choo-choo" economics.

Here's something of a truism; something that initially seems stupid to even write down, but a truism increasingly obscured by ideological jibber jabber: Deficit spending increases the deficit. There.

Curt Weldon and Michael Ledeen: Ghorbanifar's rubes

Laura Rozen on the puncturing of Congressman Curt Weldon's and ideologues Michael Ledeen's "intelligence" that Osama bin Laden was dead:

Do you notice any similarities between his source and his source, beyond the fact that the source was apparently wrong about the very same allegation? More here and here. A bad tip can happen to all of us. Then again, not all of us are lobbying to get our sources on the US government payroll as an Iran intelligence asset, as Congressman Weldon is.

Ghorbanifar's rubes. So much for Curt Weldon: Man of Intrigue. See previously here and here.

Liberal rags and Cal Thomas

Cleaning out the Bloglines backlog, and - though it's not timely - wanted to highlight this March Editor & Publisher piece:

John Winn Miller, publisher of The Olympian, the Knight Ridder daily in Olympia, Wash., says he's mad as hell and he's not going to take it anymore -- especially from popular syndicated columnist Cal Thomas.
 
"I'm tired of hearing radical columnists like you besmirch the good men and women who struggle daily to put out the very best newspaper they can," Miller writes in his paper today. Ironically, The Olympian itself carried Thomas' offending column on Sunday.
 
"Once again you've trotted out that stale cliche that newspapers like mine are undermined by what you claim is a liberal bias," Miller charges. "I know I can't change your mind. But I'll be doggone if I'm going to let your slander of my colleagues go unchallenged anymore."

Miller goes on to condemn the notion of "political litmus tests" in newsrooms. Cal Thomas responds . . . sort of:

Thomas responded, saying the findings of a Project for Excellence in Journalism [site] survey show "continuing distrust of the major media in this country. Rather than defending the bona fides of his newspaper staff, Mr. Miller might consider the findings themselves. If people are not persuaded of the fairness and balance he asserts, they won't buy the newspaper, anymore than people will patronize fast-food establishments they believe serve spoiled hamburgers."
 
The columnist, who's syndicated to nearly 600 newspapers by Tribune Media Services, added: "In business -- and newspapers are a business -- it matters less what the publisher or editor thinks than what the readers believe. As the survey shows, only 7% of journalists identify themselves as conservative and 33% say they are liberal.

See the circularity? Thomas can't point to anything specific, but after years of a concerted movement of jumping up and down about media bias as an influential voice in the pages of said media, he can then point to public distrust of the media as evidence of his original point. Not to argue that the media is therefore unbiased, but only to further point out that it doesn't follow from this that public distrust is attributable to a conservative-liberal ratio of journalists in newsrooms, as Thomas implies. Everyone distrusts the media -- liberals I know are just as paranoid about perceived conservative bias as vice versa.

In fact, this "liberal-conservative" dichotomy is a false one. To bang away at the notion that there are x-number more liberals than y-number conservative totally ignores the presence of moderates in the newsroom.

Here is the PEJ section on journalism and values Thomas is referring to. And here is their chart:

And failing to note the distinction between national and local outlets is also telling. The divide is far less dramatic, and the vast majority of Americans still gets their news from their local papers.  This may not be a big deal in reality, but Cal Thomas is playing fast and loose with the numbers so as to wield his broad brush; after all, The Olympian is not The Washington Post.

Not to argue that Americans shouldn't distrust their media (and they ought to distrust their government more), but only to show that a core pillar of conservative pudits' repetitive victimology is a pillar made of sand.

Against the neo-Jacobins

In an op-ed in the Baltimore Sun, Colin Powell's former chief-of-staff, Larry Wilkerson, aggravates my sense the America stands on history's knife edge. It is a gut feeling that accounts for the growing anti-Bush quality of a blog that started with more transcendent pretentions.

As Alexis de Tocqueville once said: "America is great because she is good. If America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great."

In January 2001, with the inauguration of George W. Bush as president, America set on a path to cease being good; America became a revolutionary nation, a radical republic. If our country continues on this path, it will cease to be great - as happened to all great powers before it, without exception.

From the Kyoto accords to the International Criminal Court, from torture and cruel and unusual treatment of prisoners to rendition of innocent civilians, from illegal domestic surveillance to lies about leaking, from energy ineptitude to denial of global warming, from cherry-picking intelligence to appointing a martinet and a tyrant to run the Defense Department, the Bush administration, in the name of fighting terrorism, has put America on the radical path to ruin.

It is difficult these days to say, "We Americans." The deliberately developed divisions required to render that are frustrating. But it is my faith in the Nation and the Constitution that leads me to believe that it is in the process of recoiling from a precipice of lunacy. In the meantime, thank goodness for Larry Wilkerson:

Unprecedented interpretations of the Constitution that holds the president as commander in chief to be all-powerful and without checks and balances marks the hubris and unparalleled radicalism of this administration.

Moreover, fiscal profligacy of an order never seen before has brought America trade deficits that boggle the mind and a federal deficit that, when stripped of the gimmickry used to make it appear more tolerable, will leave every child and grandchild in this nation a debt that will weigh upon their generations like a ball and chain around every neck. Imagine owing $150,000 from the cradle. That is radical irresponsibility.

I regret that I find myself looking in this piece for a glimmer of political opportunity for  Democrats; but in a way it is our charge, at this point. In here, I find more than the glimmer of an antidote to this absurd mind virus of the Republican Party as the security party. Can Americans in general any longer accept the tired mantras that have been thoroughly disproven by their own leadership?

Crashing the fallacy party

For my particular obsessions on rhetorical mindgames, a huge catch by the Cunning Realist (who's got some good stuff recently).

The Associated Press dares examine President Bush's use and abuse of the grandiose rhetoric of his immeasurable "reasonableness" in which he cloaks himself:

When the president starts a sentence with "some say" or offers up what "some in Washington" believe, as he is doing more often these days, a rhetorical retort almost assuredly follows.

The device usually is code for Democrats or other White House opponents. In describing what they advocate, Mr. Bush often omits an important nuance or substitutes an extreme stance that bears little resemblance to their actual position.

He typically then says he "strongly disagrees," conveniently knocking down a straw man of his own making. [Styg link mod]

It's a pretty ballsy piece, all things considered.

The question is, with whom is the president having these arguments?

A specialist in presidential rhetoric, Wayne Fields of Washington University in St. Louis, views it as "a bizarre kind of double talk" that abuses the rules of legitimate discussion.

"It's such a phenomenal hole in the national debate that you can have arguments with nonexistent people," Fields said.

The result being  -- unsurprisingly -- crap policy. Why? Because of a self-inflicted inability to think clearly about ideas, solutions, possibilities, contingencies, and -- most importantly -- the relationship of one's duty to these notions by their relationship to the welfare of the nation.

A presidency usurped?

This is the kind of stuff that leads one to conclude that the intellectual environment within the White House has irretrevably atrophied into one of incestuously unproductive rationalization, moral bankruptcy, and megalomaniacal self-regard.

Via Laura Rozen and Dan Froomkin, columnist Jim Hoagland examines the parallels between Presidents Putin's and Bush's records of mis-rule. This part stands out:

"The powers of the presidency have been eroded and usurped to the breaking point. We are engaged in a new kind of war that cannot be fought by old methods. It can only be directed by a strong executive who alone is not subject to the conflicting pressures that legislators or judges face. The public understands and supports that unpleasant reality, whatever the media and intellectuals say."

These words came from a White House aide defending U.S. policies on Guantanamo Bay prisoners, secret renditions and warrantless eavesdropping in a conversation with me. A few days later, I heard a Russian official use nearly identical terms to defend his country's coercive merging of private energy and media companies under state control.

We are a nation of liberty and of law. In that is our strength. From it we draw our breath in freedom.

We do not fetishize our leaders so as to feel self-worth. We find it in ourselves. And America most  certainly is not finding itself in thrall to the morally and intellectually bankrupt rantings that are obviously so persuasive within the Oval Office.

Usurping? They haven't succeeded in usurping the Constitution's protections. Nor will they.