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May 20, 2006 - May 13, 2006

Monday, July 18, 2005

HARD CASE. I read Hugh Hewitt's weekend blog entry about the left's practice of distorting and misrepresenting evidence in factual matters that pertain to politics. It's an excellent analysis of the difference between propaganda and information, but he seems flabbergasted that otherwise affable liberals are so willing to participate. He sets about dissecting lefty blogger Kevin Drum's rhetorical assault on the case for ties between Saddam's Iraq and al Qaida...


...but he can't help also observing that:


From this beginning, Mr. Hewitt goes on to make several points. First, he demonstrates that Kevin Drum is at least being disingenuous in the construction and semantics of his argument that there were no appreciable links between Saddam and al Qaida. Hewitt's conclusion:


After a praiseworthy golf interlude, Hewitt resumes his essay to propose (my words, not his) 1) that the left's style of argumentation is costing it the opportunity to make conversions among moderates, 2) that what he calls center-right bloggers are much more successful in proselytizing independents because they care more about facts and honest analysis, 3) that this success is owed in large part to the predominance of lawyers among the center-right bloggers, and 4) that the center-right blogosphere (CRB) is having a greater impact on the political scene generally because it demonstrates what might be called superior character to the lefty blogosphere; i.e., it is more professional, more serious-minded, more focused on ideas and their underlying logic pro and con, funnier, and -- by inference -- less ruthless in its treatment of the positions and people on the left.

Presumably, Mr. Hewitt's gentlemanly assessment of Kevin Drum is intended to be an example of such center-right superiority.

I agree that Mr. Hewitt is a gentleman, but I disagree at least in part with all the points I've inferred above. It's true that I may be putting words into his mouth, but it's not my intention here to set him up. It's simply that so much of his argument consists of putting forward examples of the good guys in the CRB that some, more succinct inferences seem permissible.

Such as this one: I think Mr. Hewitt is urging us all to be fair, objective, lawyerly, reportorial, and nice. I'll respond to this by presenting a few objections to the items on the list and then offering a platform of disagreement that encompasses them all.

1.  The left's style of argumentation is costing it the opportunity to make conversions among moderates. Here, I believe Mr. Hewitt is specifically suggesting that the rape, pillage, and destroy mentality of the lefty bloggers is also infecting the MSM and reducing its credibility. He's therefore arguing that the Kos's and Atrios's and, perhaps, the Kevin Drums and Josua Micah Marshalls as well are hurting their own cause not just in the blogosphere but in the minds of the general public. He cites recent Democrat election losses as proof. I would cite them as evidence of the opposite proposition.

Overall, the left has never coalesced around so radical an agenda as the one their issue-by-issue flamethrowing tends to obscure. The agenda is to subject the President of the United States to an assault on his abilities, motives, and character so continuous that mere antipathy can be substituted for any meaningful set of policy alternatives. Beyond its anti-Bush sentiment, the Democrat Party can offer no coherent set of policies (beyond the antique trinity of pro-choice, higher taxes, and socialized medicine) that could be construed by voters as a positive and hopeful path to the future.

Despite this vacuum at the center of the liberal mind, the Democrat Party has achieved one tie and one close electoral college outcome in the last two presidential elections, and it has achieved virtually identical outcome in the U.S. Senate. In addition, as a party lacking the presidency and majorities in either the House or the Senate, the Democrats have nevertheless managed -- with the help of the supposedly "poisoned" MSM -- to prevent multiple Republican presidents from establishing a truly conservative supreme court, to promote and advance a secularist anti-Christian cultural change in both government and private institutions despite an overwhelmingly Christian U.S. populace, and to reduce popular support for the war on terror and popular belief that there is a valid connection between the war on terror and the Iraq War. To my mind, this performance is tantamount to a stunning victory for a party that is intellectually and morally bankrupt.

How can this have been accomplished if the American people dislike the bitter rhetoric of the left, doubt the credibility of the mainstream media, and in many ways seem to be trending conservative? The answer is that most people DO distinguish between the message and the messenger, and the Democrats know it. It is the loudest and most uniformly repeated message that is most likely to be believed, and the ferocity of the message's advocates is also a contributing factor, even when that ferocity is ugly, personal, and irrational. The old saying "where there''s smoke there's fire" is an old saying because a lot of people believe it.

Furthermore, most people do not give enough of their attention and analytical ability to public affairs. This is partly due to the nature of mass media -- in your face today too close to back away from, so far distant from view tomorrow that any effort to see it whole kens naught but a tiny speck. All that's left after the usual MSM mauling of an issue is an impression flavored by an emotional stink of some kind. It was ugly... not good for the President... does he know what he's doing...?

2. Center-right bloggers are much more successful in proselytizing independents because they care more about facts and honest analysis. Not really. They can be highly effective at elevating certain stories, certain issues that the MSM wishes to twist or suppress. But they still do not possess anything like a high-speed broadband connection to the mind of the average voter. Given time and enough support among the intellectual elite, Dan Rather's version of Rathergate (mistakes made but not intentionally or negligently) will be accepted by a majority of the body politic. This despite absolute proof provided by the CRB that the documents he used and defended were forgeries. It's possible the CRB played a role in shoring up conservative and moderate support against the tsunami of propaganda spewed by the MSM during the 2004 election, but given the polar nature of the choice between candidates, Bush should have won a 45-state landslide. He didn't come close. And since the election, popular support for the U.S. military and its mission in Iraq has continued to flag at a fairly steady rate. Impossible? The message is getting through -- independents may disapprove of Kos, but a lot of them still like good old Peter Jennings because he hides his "poison" behind avuncular smiles. Against this kind of power, the CRB is still a skinny finger in a dike made of swiss cheese.

3. This success is owed in large part to the predominance of lawyers among the center-right bloggers. I've already disputed the success. Now I'll dispute the effectiveness of a CRB dominated by attorneys. This is, by the way, a key precept of Hugh Hewitt's book Blog, and I have made fun of it in the past. That was probably mean, so I'll spell it out more reasonably here. The entire purpose of a legal education is to train formerly intelligent minds to analyze every question in accordance with the narrowest applicable principle(s). This is supposed to ensure airtight logic and create a debate position that is unassailable even in the face of considerable emotional bias. That's why well trained attorneys are good at winning both debates and court cases. It's also why attorneys tend to make lousy leaders and inspire remarkably low levels of general respect and personal allegiance. (Surprised to hear someone say this? Give me your list of great American presidents who were also lawyers; I'll spot you Lincoln, and you take it from there...) The reason? They have a hard time understanding that you can be right on the facts and the logic and still fail in your cause because your opponent knows he is right in the larger sense of things. There are times when facts don't matter much if they matter at all.

The truth is, lawyers are generally awful at identifying the big picture issues that would make their case easier to argue with the "reasonable man" they pretend the law was written to reflect. The topic Hugh Hewitt used as his prime example of faulty liberal analysis is also an excellent example of my proposition. Every time a leftwing shrike or a Democrat politician asserts that it has been proven there were no ties between Saddam and Osama bin Laden, he is wrong -- absolutely wrong -- by the most elementary principle of logic. You can't prove a negative. Everyone who has ever suffered from a bout of jealousy knows this. It doesn't matter how high a pile of exculpating evidence you amass, none of it can ever prove that he/she isn't cheating on you.

That's the only principle of argument that really matters here. The Bush administration  suspected, in the wake of 9/11, that Saddam was a past and continuing danger in the war on terror because he hated the United States, had shown a predilection for acquiring weapons of mass destruction, and participated in multiple clandestine ways in the murky, treacherous, and violent politics of the middle east. For anyone to appraise the quality of that decision now in presumably factual proof/no proof terms is an act of outrageous if not deliberate intellectual and moral dishonesty. And it doesn't matter if -- like Ambrose Bierce, the meanest journalist in history -- the perpetrator of such an attempt is polite in the assembly hall. He's a blackguard, dishonest from the git-go, and refuting the facts he places in evidence serves to authenticate the validity of a nonsensical position. And that's what they count on. They can argue badly, but if you argue back at all, they win. Kevin Drum is a low-rent Iago.

And, as it happens, those of us who are not lawyers can be certain of this judgment because the same lefties who claim proof of the negative with regard to Saddam and bin Laden use the impossibility of proving a negative in all their pejorative claims about the President, the Republicans in Congress, and conservatives in the country at large.  They  know that in the cut-and-thrust of domestic politics all that's required is to make the heinous charge in the first place. It can never be entirely disproven  How many Republicans still wonder, in their heart of hearts, whether Clarence Thomas really did make dirty jokes about pubic hair with Anita Hill?

This is the basis of the whole left/liberal assault on the Bush foreign policy. Make the charges, keep making the charges, disregard whether or not the charges are mutually exclusive (war for oil? war for familial vengeance? war for crusading fundamentalist Christianity? war for the Zionist conspiracy? war to distract from the failure to get bin Laden? war to disguise complicity in 9/11? All true, by gum), and greet every attempt at reasoned rebuttal with sneering, overweening contempt. Lawyers are powerless to win such an engagement in the same way that those who seek to win the war on terror by treating it as a law enforcement problem are. It's a function of fundamentally misunderstanding the enemy and the nature of the conflict he is waging.

I am NOT saying that the lawyer bloggers in the center right are no good. They have many valuable contributions to make. But I AM saying that the blogosphere is not some debating club or informal court of law under another name. It is an electronic Hyde Park Corner, the sort of venue in which Karl Marx convinced just enough intelligent people to follow him in promoting what would become the most costly experiment in human government the world has yet produced.

4. The center-right blogosphere (CRB) is having (and ostensibly will have) a greater impact on the political scene generally because it demonstrates what might be called superior character to the lefty blogosphere; i.e., it is more professional, more serious-minded, more focused on ideas and their underlying logic pro and con, funnier, and -- by inference -- less ruthless in its treatment of the positions and people on the left. All of these attributes have their role to play, but these criteria are not sufficient to constitute a complete set of Rules for Engagement. The conservative side of this war -- and it is a war -- must include voices who go beyond the Golden Mean into dangerous territory. There must be voices of passion, stirring rhetoric, polemical cunning, savage denunciation, reckless and bloodcurdling scorn, and a daringly disrespectful sense of the absurd.

What does it take to bring down a Kos, an Atrios, a Joshua Micah Marshall? Waves of warriors who are, yes, smarter than they are, but also every bit as adept with the dirk and the flamethrower as they are. World War II is the favorite historical example of the CRB. I'll remind one and all that we didn't win that "just" war without Hiroshima.

The bloggers of InstaPunk use, and will use, all kinds of approaches to defeat our enemies foreign and domestic. None of us went to law school, and none of us is therefore guilty of the delusion that patriotism is universal among the socialists, anarchists, marxists, and totalitarians who find fault with every exercise of American power in the world. When they're being reasonable, we'll be reasonable. When they're being vicious, we'll be vicious in return. When they screw up, we'll be all over them. When they're being absurd, we'll laugh in their idiot faces. 'Nice' as a philosophy is about as ineffective as it is boring and unimaginative. And someday, even a lawyer at the crumbling barricades may turn and feel a moment's gratitude at being reinforced by a band of cutlass-swinging buccaneers.

Or so we hope.

UPDATE:  RattlerGator made an excellent comment here and a previous post at glovesoff.blogspot.com may be helpful. For those who cannot read the essay off the link, it is provided in its entirety by clicking the 'Continue' button.

Friday, July 15, 2005