The NonSequitur

Not long ago there was that commercial for cell phones which featured a powerful CEO type (in a corner office) claiming to an underling that his new cell phone plan was his way of "sticking it to the man."  The underling responded, but "you are the man."  One couldn't help but be reminded of that during the Republican convention.  In the department of things that had to be said (which is not a department here), Paul Krugman writes:

Can the super-rich former governor of Massachusetts — the son of a Fortune 500 C.E.O. who made a vast fortune in the leveraged-buyout business — really keep a straight face while denouncing “Eastern elites”?

Can the former mayor of New York City, a man who, as USA Today put it, “marched in gay pride parades, dressed up in drag and lived temporarily with a gay couple and their Shih Tzu” — that was between his second and third marriages — really get away with saying that Barack Obama doesn’t think small towns are sufficiently “cosmopolitan”?

Can the vice-presidential candidate of a party that has controlled the White House, Congress or both for 26 of the past 28 years, a party that, Borg-like, assimilated much of the D.C. lobbying industry into itself — until Congress changed hands, high-paying lobbying jobs were reserved for loyal Republicans — really portray herself as running against the “Washington elite”?

Yes, they can.

This is not some kind of ad hominem, as someone might think.  Romney's vast wealth-and his Harvard education and Eastern upbringing–make nonsense of the charge of "Eastern elitism."  Elitism would disqualify Romney (and Bush and especially McCain) well before it would Obama.  But Romney's charge, its falsity aside, is an ad hominem: rather than address the impact of Obama's policy proposals on regular non-arugula eating folk, Romney and his ilk have made a concerted effort to talk about the distracting and meaningless effemera of personality.

Is this charge from Kathleen Parker just a lie, a reverse ad hominem tu quoque, or nutpicking?

Politicizing Bristol Palin's pregnancy, though predictable, is nonetheless repugnant and has often been absurd. It may be darkly ironic that a governor-mother who opposes explicit sex ed has a pregnant daughter, but experienced parents know that what one instructs isn't always practiced by one's little darlings.

We try; we sometimes fail. There are no perfect families and most of us get a turn on the wheel of misfortune.

Were it not for the pain of a teenager who didn't deserve to be exposed and exploited, the left's hypocrisy in questioning Palin's qualifications to be vice president against the backdrop of her family's choices would be delicious. Instead, it leaves a bad taste.

Would anyone ever ask whether a male candidate was qualified for office because his daughter was pregnant?

Some also have questioned whether Palin, whose son Trig has Down syndrome, can be both a mother and a vice president. These questions aren't coming from the right—so often accused of wanting to keep women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen—but from the left.

Did someone switch the Kool-Aid?

I wonder this because Parker doesn't name anyone who makes those charges–no, saying "the left" doesn't count as naming anyone.  She might even be able to find someone, perhaps some anonymous diarist at the Daily Kos, but that would be nutpicking: trolling the comment threads of blogs looking for the person who says just what you need them to say, claiming all the while such a person represents "the left" or ("the right" for that matter).  But doesn't even bother to do this minimally sophistical thing.  That would at least give some cover to the false assertion.

It's clear that she wants to make the charge of hypocrisy.  But in order to do this she ought to have some minimum of purported hypocritical behavior.  So rather than speciously misrepresenting some particular charge against Palin, Parker has just made something up. 

Where I come from (Michigan), that's called "lying."

And it's still lying even if it's on the opinion page.

When I was a kid, I would wander alone through the woods, walk home alone from school (as a kindergartner), and ride a bike without a helmet (among much else).  Wondering aloud once not long ago how anyone ever survived, a friend of mine quipped: not everyone made it. 

On to today's story.  George "The Case for a Man with Little Experience" Will seems rightly dismayed by the idea that a person with such little experience as Sarah Palin might be chosen as a Vice Presidential candidate.  No argument here, though it's mainly her views on everything that bother me.  While complaining, however, that she has no Madisonian intellectual heft, Will displays his:

In his Denver speech, Barack Obama derided the "discredited Republican philosophy" that he caricatured in four words — "you're on your own." Then he promised to "keep . . . our toys safe." Among the four candidates for national office, perhaps only Palin might give a Madisonian answer — one cognizant of the idea that the federal government's powers are limited because they are enumerated — if asked to identify any provision of the Constitution, other than the First Amendment, that imposes meaningful limits on congressional or executive authority to act.

Doesn't seem much of a caricature when you then go on to complain that kids, when it comes to toys imported from another country, commerce of an international kind, you are indeed on your own.  But hey, not everyone makes it.  

Pundits rarely criticize each other by name.  So when they do, it's fun to point it out.  Here's Michael Kinsley on right wing sophistry  punditry re Sarah Palin, John McCain's pick for Vice President:

But that's so five minutes ago, before Sarah Palin. Already, conservative pundits have come up with creative explanations for McCain's choice of a vice presidential running mate with essentially no foreign policy experience. First prize (so far) goes to Michael Barone, who notes on the U.S. News and World Report blog that "Alaska is the only state with a border with Russia. And it is the only state with territory, in the Aleutian Islands, occupied by the enemy in World War II." I think we need to know what Sarah Palin has done, in her year and change as governor of Alaska, to protect the freedom of the Aleutian Islands before deciding how many foreign policy experience credits she deserves on their account. 

And here is the inexplicable David Brooks on the experience question:

So my worries about Palin are not (primarily) about her lack of experience. She seems like a marvelous person. She is a dazzling political performer. And she has experienced more of typical American life than either McCain or his opponent.

There's more to that but it brings up a family issue which no one should give a rats about.  I'm curious, however, how someone could experience more of a typical American life than someone else.  I suppose McCain's career in government and vast wealth and privilege would exclude him from the category of typical, but what about Obama?  Seems like his life–school on scholarship, etc.,–is fairly typical of a vast number Americans.  But besides, how would having an even more hyperbolically typical American life constitute a qualification for the most unique job in the country?

Update, I think this commenter on Crooked Timber aptly captures the issue (the comment regards Harriet Mier's nomination to the Supreme Court)–via Sadly, No!

William Safire must not have cable TV, internet, or newspaper delivery wherever he is spending is retirement.  He writes:

“Don’t tell me that Democrats won’t defend this country,” he cried angrily. “Don’t tell me that Democrats won’t keep us safe.” Who’s telling him that? By escalating criticism, he knocked down a straw man, the oldest speechifying trick in the book. He promised to “restore our moral standing” (shades of Jimmy Carter) “so that America is once more the last, best hope for” (Lincoln wrote of) “all who are called to the cause of freedom” (shades of George W. Bush). But does he apply that idealist “cause of freedom” to the invaded Georgians? He didn’t say.

You have absolutely got to be kidding me.  Who is telling him that?  That claim–that Democrats won't defend you–has been the cornerstone of the right's argument against the Democrats for seven years–made in various forms by nearly every one of their intellectual and political superstars.

But he's right.  It is a straw man. 

After eight years of a President who, at the time he was elected, had barely held a full-time job, who not only knew little about anything but didn't care or didn't think his ignorance was a vice, who had not volunteered for anything (not to mention the war he supported), and whose greatest achievement at the time of his election was quitting drinking, Barack Obama, Democratic candidate for President of the United States and a person of myriad and well-documented achievements, cannot with a straight face be called an unknown or mysterious quantity.  But alas, Charles Krauthammer will say anything:

The oddity of this convention is that its central figure is the ultimate self-made man, a dazzling mysterious Gatsby. The palpable apprehension is that the anointed is a stranger – a deeply engaging, elegant, brilliant stranger with whom the Democrats had a torrid affair. Having slowly woken up, they see the ring and wonder who exactly they married last night.  

A quickie marriage after an 18-month courtship?  Not exactly.

Ruth Marcus writes:

It's not just about the narrative.

So get ready for the narrative:

Obama's exotic background — his unique melange of Kenya, Kansas, Hawaii and Harvard — makes the job of presenting his life story particularly important. Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell made that point bluntly in an interview with Post reporters and editors Tuesday, comparing Obama to the egghead Adlai Stevenson, who twice failed as the Democrats' nominee.

"With people who have a lot of gifts, it's hard for people to identify with them," Rendell said. "Barack Obama is handsome. He's incredibly bright. He's incredibly well spoken, and he's incredibly successful — not exactly the easiest guy in the world to identify with."

Obama's strategists acknowledge this phenomenon. "Our candidate is outside of the mold," one senior adviser told me. "There are so many things about our candidate that are different that the challenge that we have is to give people a confidence that despite all these things that feel different, 'Okay, I get what he's about personally' . . . that his family is like every other family that your kids go to school with."

This is necessary but not sufficient, as Obama advisers agree. Obama needs to seem more familiar and approachable to voters, yes, but he also needs to convey — to use President Clinton's famous phrasing — that he feels their pain.

So far this argument rests on the authority of the various fairly prominent and representative Democrats she mentions.  It might be stronger if she softened her claim a bit to say that it seems to some Democrats that Obama needs to x, y, z.  My point is rather another: A more circumspect writer might have noticed the vacuousness of the "regular guy"–you know, the one you think you want to have a beer with, but in reality does not drink beer, or wouldn't ever have a beer with a non-Yalie–persona as a qualification for President.  A more circumspect writer would have also wondered whether people actually want that, or whether it is just a kind of storyline–a kind of narrative as it were–she and others have been pushing.  Even though some prominent Democrats seem to agree (and indeed, they seem to be the right kinds of people to ask), maybe a more critical mind, or at least a more industrious one, would bother to inquire whether the public gives a rats about who they can have a beer with.  But perhaps what I want would fall outside of the narrative of the clairvoyant pundit, who doesn't need to do any research.

It was stuff like this that inspired us to start this blog four years ago.  From the All-Around Gold Medalist in Sophistry, George Will:

Barack Obama has made his economic thinking excruciatingly clear, so it also is clear that his running mate should be Rumpelstiltskin. He spun straw into gold, a skill an Obama administration will need to fulfill its fairy-tale promises.

Obama recently said that he would "require that 10 percent of our energy comes from renewable sources by the end of my first term — more than double what we have now." Note the verb "require" and the adjective "renewable."

By 2012 he would "require" the economy's huge energy sector to — here things become comic — supply half as much energy from renewable sources as already is being supplied by just one potentially renewable source. About 20 percent of America's energy comes from nuclear energy produced using fuel rods, which, when spent, can be reprocessed into fresh fuel.

Obama is (this is part of liberalism's catechism) leery of nuclear power. He also says — and might say so even if Nevada were not a swing state — that he distrusts the safety of Nevada's Yucca Mountain for storage of radioactive waste. Evidently he prefers today's situation — nuclear waste stored at 126 inherently insecure above-ground sites in 39 states, within 75 miles of where more than 161 million Americans live.

By any ordinary definition, nuclear power might be an extremely efficient resource, but, as the problem of nuclear waste makes painfully clear, it is not entirely renewable–nor is it without potential environmental cost.  To claim otherwise stretches the definition of "renewable."

So much of sophistry, so it seems to me, consists in this kind of overreaching–there's nothing wrong with claiming that Obama's energy project leaves out very efficient, safe and clean energy resources (if that's the case), there's just no need to claim he's somehow involved in a laughable contradiction.  Besides, the man who wrote "The Case for Bush" ought to be more circumspect when he says this:

In 1996, Bob Dole, citing the Clinton campaign's scabrous fundraising, exclaimed: "Where's the outrage?" In this year's campaign, soggy with environmental messianism, deranged self-importance and delusional economics, the question is: Where is the derisive laughter? 

Oh it's there alright.

This blog–I used to hate calling it that but such is life–is four years old today.  The parade of silliness which moved us to create it has, by my reckoning, not diminished.

Sorry McCain fan or fans, it's hard not to make fun of this:

“I define rich in other ways besides income,” he said. “Some people are wealthy and rich in their lives and their children and their ability to educate them. Others are poor if they’re billionaires.”

That may be.  When the question is tax policy (as it most certainly was) however, there's only one kind of rich that counts–the kind with 7 or 10 or more houses, and 270,000 a year on household staff expenses.