by Charles
As noted in my previous post, I’ve been critical of Donald Rumsfeld’s performance as Defense Secretary. But my opposition does not extend to cheap shots. An example is the hatchet job by Robert Burns of Associated Press, making stuff up about Rumsfeld’s Tuesday speech at the American Legion National Convention. Thankfully, McQ at QandO exposes the rank bias that Burns is guilty of, comparing Burns’ interpretation of Rumsfeld’s speech with Rumsfeld’s actual words. [Update: In typical fashion, AP changed its content without announcing any changes. See the QandO update.]
The worst part of Burns’ misleading reportage was that it was unquestioningly spread to other news sources such as CNN, ABC, Fox and who knows how many other outlets. Mainstream media was already burned with fauxtography in the Israel-Hezbollah War, yet here we are again, witnessing a mainstream media reporter peddling faux news. Predictably, the Democratic Party took the Burns’ hit piece and ran with it, never mind the actual text of the speech. [Update: Allahpundit has found more interpretation problems concerning Rumsfeld’s speech.]
It’s hard enough fighting an information war against al Qaeda and its sympathizers. The challenge is all the greater when a sometimes hostile media twists and distorts the words of the very people who are directly engaged in fighting this War Against Militant Islamism. Concerning the Information War, Rumsfeld is dead right:
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Monday he is deeply troubled by the success of terrorist groups in "manipulating the media" to influence Westerners.
"That’s the thing that keeps me up at night," he said during a question-and-answer session with about 200 naval aviators and other Navy personnel at this flight training base for Navy and Marine pilots.
I should note that the above was also reported by AP’s Robert Burns. It is troubling the success of terrorist groups manipulating the media to influence westerners, and the Israel-Hezbollah War is just the latest example. The answer, simply, is to respond quickly and–if need be–forcefully. The Bush administration and the Defense Department need a media war room in order to answer attacks and prevent offenses such as Burns’. They need rapid response teams to rebut false and misleading charges made by foreign media and terrorist mouthpieces. Bloggers can help.
It is good news that Rumsfeld and Cheney are now taking more of an offensive in this Information War. Better late than never, I suppose. But as the saying goes, better never late. The information front is every bit as important as the others, the hot war included. Ayman al-Zawahiri understands this concept well. In his letter to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi last October, the number two man in al Qaeda wrote the following in his outline for waging successful jihad:
However, despite all of this, I say to you: that we are in a battle, and that more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media. And that we are in a media battle in a race for the hearts and minds of our Umma.
Al Qaeda knows its doesn’t have the firepower to win, so it wins where it can, which is where the Information War enters the picture. This is a war against an ideology. To counter it and defeat it, we must confront the ideology and tell the world why and how it must be tossed into the dustbin of history. Rumsfeld himself admitted that he’s fallen short on the information front:
Well, I guess another thing I would say — that I would change — I would — even to this day, I do not spend as much time thinking about how to communicate as I do doing the things I have to do here. I mean, we just evacuated 15,000 people out of Lebanon — moved a major city. Just — we just sent 500 firefighters out to the west coast. We have got so many things going on in this department. And I wasn’t recruited and asked to take this job because I had spent my life in communications. I just haven’t. And yet, the fact of the matter is the enemy is fairly skillful. I mean, they have media committees, they work the problem, they plan their attacks to get the maximum drama so that they’ll get on the front page, they lie and cheat and dummy up photographs and do all kinds of things that are totally unacceptable in our society, and they’re never held to account for it. They know how to manipulate the media in this country and in the capitals of the world. And they know that they can’t win a battle out there in any — in Iraq or Afghanistan. All they can do is win in the capitals of the Western countries. And the center of gravity of these wars, these conflicts, this struggle is clearly in Washington, D.C., and in the country.
Rumsfeld has been too late recognizing, addressing and responding in the Information War. It’s within his power to change the communications set-up, yet little has happened (but give him credit for addressing it these past couple of weeks). In this War Against Militant Islamism, a Defense Secretary needs to have a competent media apparatus. Bush is also responsible for these lapses. This doesn’t mean that we answer untruth with untruth, but we do have to answer. If not, false perceptions will continue to supercede in the Muslim world.
Last week, Victor Davis Hanson wrote a piece on the challenges of engaging in the Information War:
So what Mr. Bush is faced with is this nearly impossible paradox of half war/half peace: at a time when most are getting fed up with abhorrent Middle Eastern jihadists who blow up, hijack, and behead in the name of their religion, he is attempting to convince the same American public and the Western world at large to spend their blood and treasure to help Muslim Afghans, Iraqis, and now Lebanese, who heretofore — whether out of shared anti-Americanism or psychological satisfaction in seeing the overdog take a hit — have not been much eager to separate themselves from the rhetoric of radical Islam.
In any case, the administration’s problem is not really its (sound) strategy, nor its increasingly improved implementation that we see in Baghdad, but simply an American public that so far understandably cannot easily differentiate millions of brave Iraqis and Afghans, who risk their lives daily to hunt terrorists and ensure reform, from the Islamists of the Muslim Street who broadcast their primordial hatred for Israel and the United States incessantly.
[…]
What, then, is needed — aside from crushing the jihadists and securing Afghanistan and Iraq — is more articulation and explanation. The word "liberal" — as in promoting liberal values abroad, and reminding the world of the traditions of liberal tolerance — needs to be employed more often.
Some tough language is also helpful on occasion: any time the free democracies of Iraq or Afghanistan wish to vote to send American troops home, of course we will comply. Likewise, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon are under no compulsion to accept hated American aid or military help. And just as the American public needs reminding that millions of Middle Easterners are currently fighting jihadist terror in Afghanistan and Iraq — we wish we could say the same about our "allies" in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia — so too the Iraqi and Afghan governments should convey to the American people that their support is appreciated, and its continuance deemed vital.
How odd that the president must explain the pathologies of the Middle East to such a degree as to warn Americans of our mortal danger, but not to the point of excess so that we feel that there is no hope for such people. He must somehow suggest that jihadism could not imperil us were it not for the "moderates" who tolerate and appease it — while this is the very same group that we feel duty-bound to offer an alternative other than theocracy or dictatorship. And he must offer a postwar plan of reconstruction to the citizens of the Middle East at a time when many of them do not feel that their romantic jihadists have ever really been defeated at all.
Even the eloquence of a Lincoln or Churchill would find all that difficult.
Yes, eloquence is needed and it is d*mn difficult. But so what. It’s hard work, but the effort needs to be made. The issue for Bush (and his inner circle of advisors) hasn’t been the message itself, but its delivery. Over the course of these two administrations, rather than being a Reaganesque Great Communicator, George Bush (and, by extension, the administration) has been an Occasional Communicator. As I mentioned here, Stephen Green wrote a long and important piece about this very issue:
Previously, I wrote that in order to win the Terror War, we must "prove the enemy ideology to be ineffective," just as we did in the Cold War. In that conflict, we did so in three ways: by fighting where we had to while maintaining our freedoms, but most importantly by out-growing the Communist economies. I argued that similar methods would win the Terror War. We’d have to fight, we’d have to maintain our freedoms, but the primary key to victory in the Current Mess is taking the initiative.
What I didn’t see then – but what I do see today – is what "taking the initiative" really means.
It means, fighting a media war. It means, turning the enemy’s one great strength into our own. Broadcast words, sounds, and images are the arm of decision in today’s world.
And if that assessment is correct, then we’re losing this war and badly.
Green wrote this almost ten months ago, and I think his assessment is still accurate. Last March, I mentioned a commentary by Dick Morris, who wrote the following:
If Bush doesn’t get his act together and begin to work hard at building popular support, his self-indulgence will land him in ever-deeper misery. His ratings will stay stagnant; then he’ll lose one or both houses of Congress — and spend his final two years in office dodging opposition bullets, subpoenas, perhaps even impeachment. It will mean personal misery for this good man, and leave a cloud on his legacy that will take years to erase.
All because he doesn’t want to do what he must — get up every day and go out and speak to America.
President Bill Clinton kept his job rating over 60 percent through all the days of Monica and impeachment. It had nothing to do with a good economy; as Bush is finding out, a growing GDP doesn’t guarantee growing approval ratings. Clinton went before the nation every day with a new speech, an executive order, a proposal, a bill signing or some other media event.
He didn’t just recycle his old proposals. Each day, he unearthed a new idea or initiative to keep his daily majority. He knew that without it, with an opposition Congress, he was a goner.
Dick Morris has been wrong many a time, but in this case (and communications is his specialty), I think he’s right. In his heart of hearts, I’m guessing that Tony Snow agrees with this as well. Here’s my outline, for a start:
- Iraq is one of the two most important issues on Bush’s plate. He and his people need to get out there every day, providing new information. The daily campaign is a fact of life, and Bush has the bully pulpit for steering the national discussion.
- On Iraq, don’t cheerlead, don’t resort to overused rhetoric and don’t get too alarmist. Otherwise, folks will just tune out. Rather, provide more and better information about what’s going on and what we’re doing to achieve victory.
- Remind the public of our overall strategy frequently and not just on the U.S. military websites. Give examples of the tactics being employed to accomplish our objectives.
- Answer the major criticisms quickly. If we’ve made a mistake, it doesn’t hurt to admit it, and then discuss how future mistakes will be prevented.
- Answer the false and misleading charges instantly.
- Take al Qaeda and its sympathizers–and the ideology–to task. Put them on their heels propaganda-wise. Personally, I believe Islam is a religion of submission, not peace, but we can at least encourage the more moderate Muslim groups to confront the extremists.
It’s a big task, but it’s part of the package. We can’t win the larger war without winning the Information War. The issue isn’t that we’re not responding, but not well enough.
The AP was perfectly fair in its reporting — McQ’s criticisms are nonsense.
There are words, and there are deeds. All the calls for steely resolve in the world mean nothing when not accompanied by actual real-world successes.
If this President had ever been serious about this Global War on Metaphor, he’d have called for more soldiers and tax increases and war loans.
Donald Rumsfeld is still Secretary of Defense for a reason: the man who hired him wants him there. All the hot air in the world won’t change the reality of Rumsfeld’s accomplishments. Facts, as they say, are stubborn things.
I wrote this more for the Redstate readers than the ObWi crowd but thought, what the heck, might as well put it here, too. I’m guessing mixed-to-negative reactions at both sites, but for different reasons.
For those of you who don’t want to go hunting through Bizarro World (though it’s the top post right now), here’s the post in the alternate reality.
that QandO piece wasn’t really much of an expose’ (can’t make that accented e).
his point #1 is silly – Rumsfeld did accuse a strawman of wanting to appease a “new type of fascism”. does anyone thinks that strawwman isn’t a stand-in for Bush’ critics ?
his point #2 is only slightly less silly, if only because Rumsfeld’s strawman was a little more subtle. nonetheless, Rumsfeld did invoke the specter of those with ” moral and intellectual confusion”; and again it’s silly to see that strawman as standing in for anyone but Bush critics.
point #3 is really silly. QandO writes: “He never said it should be obvious that confrontation was preferable to appeasement. He instead asked a question for others to answer for themselves.”
but Rumsfeld didn’t ask a real question, he posed a rhetorical question. in fact, it’s yet another strawman: “…can we truly afford to believe that somehow vicious extremists can be appeased?”
yes, QandO, we need to puzzle that one out for ourselves. tough stuff. a regular moral dillemma.
point #4 … QandO quibbles over a paraphrase, poorly.
—
and to do all this, QandO parses, nitpicks, quibbles, plays dumb, pretends that those strawmen aren’t there, or that nobody understands who all those strawmen are supposed to represent.
sheesh.
Whom, exactly, is the propaganda war, ahem, sorry, war of ideas aimed at? The Western citizenry? Or the Islamic street? Because those are two very different audiences with very different needs.
I would argue that it’s more important to rob extremist movements of recruits and supporters than to convince the home audiences of anything. Unless we’re talking about upcoming elections, that is.
VDH: In any case, the administration’s problem is … simply an American public that so far understandably cannot easily differentiate millions of brave Iraqis and Afghans, who risk their lives daily to hunt terrorists and ensure reform, from the Islamists of the Muslim Street who broadcast their primordial hatred for Israel and the United States incessantly.
hmmm.
And thread is open at TiO (formerly HoCB) It’s when we aren’t needed that we stand at our readiest…
Charles: I’m not sure I get this. First, QandO’s criticisms seem to me to be pretty trivial. Rumsfeld is claiming that an unnamed “some quarters” or “many” think various silly things, such as: that terrorism can be appeased. It seems pretty clear to me that these nameless idiots are meant to be identified with the administration’s critics (surely you don’t think he’s chastising the administration’s supporters?) The AP makes this explicit. Similarly, Rumsfeld asks a series of rhetorical questions: questions whose answer is obvious. The AP takes him to be asserting those answers. This is slightly sloppy, but not a big deal.
Second, I don’t see that this is evidence of bias. In fact, I think that charges of bias would be stronger if the AP played it absolutely straight. Consider this alternate news story:
I mean: that really is the alternative.
Third: supposing for the moment that it is bias, what does it have to do with our information war on al Qaeda? Would the AP’s glossing Rumsfeld’s “some” and “many” as “administration critics” do anything at all to weaken support for his policies in this country, or to strengthen opposition to it in the Middle East? I honestly don’t see how this is supposed to work.
Fourth, I am at a loss as to why you think that the problem with our Iraq policy that’s most worth dwelling on is a communication failure — as opposed to things like the absolutely incompetent prosecutions of the war, and the manipulation of intelligence before it. Our problem in Iraq isn’t mainly propaganda, it’s that we’ve done an absolutely disastrous job at a war we did not need to fight, one in which our failure will have enormous consequences that it will take decades of very hard work to undo. This isn’t about communication, any more than Katrina was. It’s about this administration’s having been utterly irresponsible, and as a result having absolutely failed to do its job.
Not everything can be spun.
Not everything can be spun.
That seems to be an unproven hypothesis.
lj: Katrina.
Oh, brother. I can’t wait it see if QandO is as generous in ignoring the obvious and time-honored tools of rhetoric and implication the next time a Democrat says something concerning Iraq. Something tells me he won’t be.
Bloggers can help.
I do try.
I love the idea that the US hasn’t already been fighting a very effective propaganda war for years. The post as a whole makes for excellent deadpan satire, though I worry that it’s so deadpan that some people might accidentally take it seriously.
Hil,
If you go back to QandO, you’ll see that AP changed its content. Burns got busted, and the editors made some changes, without mentioning (not surprisingly) that any changes were made in the first place. If they didn’t think they did anything wrong, why the unannounced “adjustments”? Of course it was spun.
On our Iraq policy, I’m saying it’s a problem, not the problem. But I was talking more about the war in general, not Iraq specifically.
Sorry, how does the fact that they got mau-mau’ed into editing mean that there was a thing wrong with the initial version?
Re: Katrina
Maybe it’s reading too much McManus, but I think the jury is still out on that.
And Steve Poole, I loved your guest stint at Crooked Timber, please forgive me for not moving you to my reading list after that.
No doubt it’s just a failure of memory, but at the moment I can’t remember a more outlandish post here.
“I can’t wait it see if QandO is as generous in ignoring the obvious and time-honored tools of rhetoric and implication the next time a Democrat says something concerning Iraq.”
Is that the time-honored tools of rhetoric and implication used by the Associated Press when reporting? 🙂
Seriously, Sebastian, since when has it been off-limits to paraphrase language based on the meaning it was obviously intended to convey? Since when has it been a reporter’s duty to pretend that outrageous rhetoric ceases to be outrageous if you just phrase it as a rhetorical question rather than a declarative sentence?
Charles –
Some questions, if you care to make an answer.
What did Burns make up?
Who is calling for a rapprochement with terrorists, or seeking to appease them?
What terrorist organizations are manipulating Western media outlets? Can you give one example?
Thanks –
Should I pretend you weren’t asking a rhetorical question, Sebastian? I mean, I know conservatives have little regard for fancy-schmancy book learnin’, but really.
How does our SecDef’s stumbling through a series of arrant lies and nonsense help us win the Information War?
Thank you very much, liberal japonicus. Of course you are forgiven. 🙂
A propos of the remarkable post above and its satirical feat of disturbingly lifelike earnestness, I am reminded of what Rumsfeld said in 2002 after the Office of Strategic Influence was closed down:
“You can have the name, but I’m gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done and I have.”
I mean, they have media committees, they work the problem, they plan their attacks to get the maximum drama so that they’ll get on the front page, they lie and cheat and dummy up photographs and do all kinds of things that are totally unacceptable in our society, and they’re never held to account for it.
The irony of these words coming out of Donald Rumsfeld’s mouth — Donald!! Rumsfeld!!! — just . . . there aren’t even words.
Let’s start with dummied up photographs. Someone else can take on lying and cheating.
CB: if American interests had not long ago won the information war about our relationship to the Middle East, we would be speaking of the 50 year cold war against Iran, not the threat of worldwide terrorism.
Ask yourself to compare the severity of the impact of American actions against Iran compared to the severity of the actions of militant Islam — whomever you want to include in that — against the US.
“Seriously, Sebastian, since when has it been off-limits to paraphrase language based on the meaning it was obviously intended to convey?”
Isn’t “obviously intended to convey” the point in contention?
To continue your rhetorical strategy: do you, personally, contend that Rumsfeld’s intention was other than that conveyed by thge AP’s paraphrase? Would you care to share what, specifically, you think he meant that the AP misrepresented?
Isn’t “obviously intended to convey” the point in contention?
No. The point in contention is whether you can get away with denying the obvious.
Isn’t “obviously intended to convey” the point in contention?
Not if one is being serious and reading spoken English like 99% of native speakers understand it. If one adds in the track record of the Bush administration in re: these rhetorical tricks, one can suss with near certainty what Rumsfeld’s speech was “obviously intended to convey.”
“Not if one is being serious and reading spoken English like 99% of native speakers understand it.”
I’ve been spectacularly unsuccessful with that argument on this blog when discussing rather simple words like “target” so I’m not inclined to just give that to you.
See also the wrong yet very-much-accepted idea that “imminent danger” was a key part of the argument in the run-up to the war against Iraq.
“one can suss with near certainty what Rumsfeld’s speech was “obviously intended to convey.”
And is it the same as what the Associated Press reported? No.
Rumsfeld is talking about the attacks in “New York and Washington, D.C., Bali, London, Madrid, Moscow and so many other places”. Considering what we know about who perpetrated these attacks that he’s mentioning, it’s really surprising to me that he would say something like this a few sentences later: “Can we afford the luxury of pretending that the threats today are simply law enforcement problems, like robbing a bank or stealing a car; rather than threats of a fundamentally different nature requiring fundamentally different approaches?” I take it that the different approach here isn’t appeasement (which would be a different approach!), but rather militant antiterrorism. Considering the diversity of the groups who perpetrated the attacks he has mentioned, isn’t it batty to think that there are militaristic solutions enough to cover the globe? What militaristic solution is going to solve the problem of Chechnya? What militaristic solution that Russia has not already tried?
And is it the same as what the Associated Press reported? No.
Please describe the inconsistencies as you see them.
“Information War” = “How can we make this festering pig’s ear look like a silk purse?”
Another day, another propaganda campaign. Yawn.
I’m off to volleyball, but I would say that McQ is certainly correct about the distortion in
“Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Tuesday accused critics of the Bush administration’s Iraq and counterterrorism policies of trying to appease “a new type of fascism.”
and
“In unusually explicit terms, Rumsfeld portrayed the administration’s critics as suffering from “moral or intellectual confusion” about what threatens the nation’s security and accused them of lacking the courage to fight back.”
Neither of those are fair characterizations of the speech or portions of the speech.
What terrorist organizations are manipulating Western media outlets? Can you give one example?
One example is the rusty ambulance. Perhaps this was not entirely orchestrated by Hizballah.
Neither of those are fair characterizations of the speech or portions of the speech.
And yet you still don’t say who Rumsfeld was referring to as suffering from “moral or intellectual confusion”, if not critics of the administration’s policies. The Dutch? Scuba divers? Perhaps people who leave bad tips in cabs? Any suggestions as to who you think he was talking about?
I wonder if Rumsfeld felt moral or intellectual confusion back when the Reagan administration was providing diplomatic cover for Iraq to use nerve gas and mustard gas in the Iran-Iraq war.
See also the wrong yet very-much-accepted idea that “imminent danger” was a key part of the argument in the run-up to the war against Iraq.
Sebastian, while a loss in an internet debate shouldn’t be taken as a definitive answer, presenting the losing side as ‘wrong yet very much accepted’ seems a bit much. Or would you say that the acceptance of the notion that “the Bush administration argued in the runup to the war that there was an imminent threat from Iraq” is a victory in the information war for the terrorists?
lj, “presenting the winning side”?
Hmmm, good point, rf.
But to go a bit further, since Sebastian was arguing against the idea that the notion [of imminent threat was a key part of the argument] was a ‘complete fabrication’ and he lost, it raises the question of what evidence or argument would have him actually abandon that notion. If 3 years additional years of Die Wacht am Iraq doesn’t provide enough evidence of someone fooling themselves, I’m not sure what will.
I’ve been spectacularly unsuccessful with that argument on this blog when discussing rather simple words like “target” so I’m not inclined to just give that to you.
Unsuccessful with whom? Jesurgislac? So what?
See also the wrong yet very-much-accepted idea that “imminent danger” was a key part of the argument in the run-up to the war against Iraq.
Uh, if you think the Bush administration did not “obviously intend to convey” that there was an imminent threat from Iraq, then I can see whence your confusion over the Rumsfeld speech arises.
And is it the same as what the Associated Press reported? No.
Then you’ll find it trivial, nay, effortless to tell us all what Rumsfeld did intend to convey, n’est-ce pas?
I would say that McQ is certainly correct about the distortion in…
well, then you’re both wrong.
But my opposition does not extend to cheap shots.
Ah, irony.
this War Against Militant Islamism
sometimes, when a software project is starting to crumble, management will change the name of the product, over and over – trying to find just the right words to describe it. and sometimes, that means they simply don’t have a clear grasp of just what it is they’ve told their employees to Go Forth And Produce. as a programmer, that scares me.
What did Burns make up?
I think McQ explained it pretty well, russell. You should read what he had to say.
Who is calling for a rapprochement with terrorists, or seeking to appease them?
Rumsfeld didn’t specify. Burns misleadingly did (Bush administration critics), at least until AP made its unannounced changes to the content.
What terrorist organizations are manipulating Western media outlets? Can you give one example?
Hezbollah did a pretty good job, especially with Reuters.
CB: if American interests had not long ago won the information war about our relationship to the Middle East, we would be speaking of the 50 year cold war against Iran, not the threat of worldwide terrorism.
I really don’t understand what you’re saying, Ara.
Ask yourself to compare the severity of the impact of American actions against Iran compared to the severity of the actions of militant Islam — whomever you want to include in that — against the US.
Do you think our actions against Iran are on the same moral plane as Islamists’ actions against the U.S.? If not, why the juxtaposition?
If “imminent danger” wasn’t part of the argument, why was it so widely accepted?
Funny how all those people mis-interpreted Bush. One wonders why he (or others in the administration) did not correct such a widespread misconception…
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/05/20030507-7.html
Q Well, we went to war, didn’t we, to find these — because we said that these weapons were a direct and imminent threat to the United States? Isn’t that true?
MR. FLEISCHER: Absolutely. One of the reasons that we went to war was because of their possession of weapons of mass destruction. And nothing has changed on that front at all. We said what we said because we meant it. We had the intelligence to report it. Secretary Powell said it. And I may point out to you, as you may know, there is a news conference at Department of Defense today at 2:00 p.m. to discuss one element in this. And so we have always had confidence, we continue to have confidence that WMD will be found. He’s had a long period of time to hide what he has in a variety of different places, and there is a whole protocol of the search that is underway, that is being conducted in a very methodical fashion.
Now, if they weren’t portraying the threat as being imminent, why that “absolutely” in response to a reporter asking what the rationale for the war was, and describing the threat as imminent?
…sometimes, when a software project is starting to crumble, management will change the name of the product, over and over – trying to find just the right words to describe it.
I would agree, cleek, but that has nothing to do with my calling the current conflict the WAMI. I’ve been using the term for over a year, and I believe it is the best name for this war.
Rumsfeld didn’t specify. Burns misleadingly did (Bush administration critics), at least until AP made its unannounced changes to the content.
shamefully disingenuous, or fabulously deluded. it’s hard to decide.
Do you think our actions against Iran are on the same moral plane as Islamists’ actions against the U.S.? If not, why the juxtaposition?
Jesus Christ, Charles, we backed and funded Iraq in a war against Iran that cost Iran nearly a million casualties. Don’t come in here tossing around phrases like “moral plane” as if you have any understanding of what they mean, and as if some warped idea of “good intentions” excuses our actions in the Iran-Iraq war.
Now, if they weren’t portraying the threat as being imminent, why that “absolutely” in response to a reporter asking what the rationale for the war was, and describing the threat as imminent?
Congratulations, shinobi, you found the one reference. Because Fleisher said it once (and mistakenly so) in a press gaggle, therefore that single reference must have represented the entire administration’s position on imminence, even though Bush and others never used the term. Not that they didn’t describe Saddam’s Iraq as a threat or a growing threat or a gathering threat, etc.
This post makes me nostalgic for the classic “meaning of ‘is'” debates.
matttbastard: no kidding. At least people were getting blowjobs then.
Jesus Christ, Charles, we backed and funded Iraq in a war against Iran that cost Iran nearly a million casualties.
A little perspective, Phil. In the 1980s, we provided a whopping 0.6% of total weaponry to Saddam. Some backing indeed. We slightly favored Iraq because the Khomeini regime had long before stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held your fellow Americans hostage, and the U.S. did not want this fundamentalist mullahocracy to expand beyond its borders. We chose what was thought the lesser evil at the time. You and Ara should save your condemnation for Russia, China and France, which provided 85% of Saddam’s arsenal.
Me, too, but likely for different reasons.
I’m beginning to suspect some intellectual speciation at work, here, because this is just as obviously a blatantly incorrect paraphrase in my eyes as it is dead-on in the eyes of some of you.
We chose what was thought the lesser evil at the time.
Cause God knows, it was either support Iraq or support Iran, no other choices available.
Anyone prefer the New York Post’s headline (“Appeasers, Beware”)?
Slarti,
All I am seeing is the AP reporter filling in the extremely obvious blanks in Rumsfeld’s speech. I would love to see anyone claiming this was a distortion explain who Rumsfeld was referring to, if not critics of the war. Or in other words, what cleek said near the top of the thread.
this is just as obviously a blatantly incorrect paraphrase in my eyes as it is dead-on in the eyes of some of you.
Interesting… there’s such a wide range of plausible readings of that text, especially without having the benefit of hearing his intonations, that it’s probably impossible for any of us to convince the other side.
My own initial reaction to McQ’s post was that the original AP summary was a bit overstated but not nearly as obviously wrong as McQ was putting it. To me, Rumsfeld’s questions are obviously rhetorical and pointed rather than sincere, but I don’t know how I could prove it to someone who has a different reading.
All I am seeing is the AP reporter filling in the extremely obvious blanks in Rumsfeld’s speech.
Yes, I’m sure they are obvious, to you. That’s what reporters do, you know: fill in your blanks.
This is all part and parcel of make-it-up-for-yourself interpretations. I know this may be difficult to grasp, but there is more than one country on this planet that has had to deal with terrorists, and there’s more than one way of dealing with them. Imagine!
Possibly actually reading what Rumsfeld said without inviting personal insult might work. I’m in doubt, though, because I mostly can’t get some of you to read what I say without reading in a whole lot of what I don’t, in the bargain.
So, pretty much, I don’t know why I’m bothering, here. Maybe I’m suffering from an excess of optimism today.
Slarti,
If you can’t actually respond to what I (or several others) have said, lobbing insults left and right isn’t likely to help.
Hey Charles –
I read McQ and found his comments to be a textbook example of straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel.
I’ll be straight with you. When you say “Information War”, I hear “propaganda”. I’ve had my fill of propaganda. We’ve had nothing but propaganda for the last five years.
It’s time for people who support our current foreign policy to wake up and smell the coffee. Things are going to hell in a handbasket. The reason for that is not because the dreaded MSM is ganging up on you. The reason for that is that the policies themselves are crap. They are the embodiment of folly.
Propaganda, “information war”, or however you want to style it, will not change that.
Hey, it could be that Hezbollah staged a photo op with a rusty ambulance that had had its top vent removed. That would get no traction, at all, if Israel had not spent the previous weeks bombing the hell out of the civilian infrastructure of Beirut, and of Lebanon generally.
Get it?
Dig this: the militant Islamic movements that have been popping up around the world over the last 20 years or so are not “the Nazis”. Nobody is advocating for “appeasement” with “Islamofascists”. People who criticize our current foreign policy for the very, very, very many good reasons that it deserves criticisms are not modern-day Chamberlains. Neither Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, or any of their crowd are modern day Churchills.
The more that advocates of our current foreign policy try to claim otherwise, the more clownish and out of touch with reality they appear.
If you want to win the “information war”, you do well to begin by acknowleding reality. It will improve your credibility.
Thanks
If you can’t actually respond to what I (or several others) have said, lobbing insults left and right isn’t likely to help.
A) I did, and B) now you’re starting to get it.
Slarti,
A. No, you didn’t. You just lobbed insults at me in lieu thereof.
B. No, I still don’t see any other reasonable reading of Rumsfeld speech than an attack on critics of the Administration. If you can suggest who else he was referring to, please do.
If you’re suggesting that he’s talking about you, I invite you to shoehorn yourself into the description.
Could be ego, I suppose, but everything is NOT in fact about you.
“If you’re suggesting that he’s talking about you, I invite you to shoehorn yourself into the description.”
I have. It fits as well as any suit of straw can, but it was clearly designed for me (and other critics of the Adminsitration).
“everything is NOT in fact about you.”
Doubtless true, but when someone quotes me, and then makes silly remarks about reading comprehension, I typically come to the conclusion it is.
Crooks and liars has a decent Olbermann bit on this: here I hope
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/08/30/keith-olbermann-delivers-one-hell-of-a-commentary-on-rumsfeld if the link didn’t work.
Thanks Charles, I’m glad we’re discussing this, we probably wouldn’t without you.
If Olbermann is your best weapon, you’re drawing on an empty quiver.
Doubtless true, but when someone quotes me, and then makes silly remarks about reading comprehension, I typically come to the conclusion it is.
Who is “someone”?
Slarti & Charles: in your opinion, to whom was Rumsfeld referring?
If you want to win the “information war”, you do well to begin by acknowleding reality. It will improve your credibility.
Amen to that. Look: we can parse the obtuse ramblings of Donald Rumsfeld all we want. They are completely, utterly irrelevant to the facts in Iraq right now.
And those facts have become rather unambiguous: our misbegotten invasion has let loose a nightmare and harmed America’s interests. We have 140,000 men and women at the end of a very tenuous supply line, in very hostile country, and our Administration’s policies are making that supply line, and their situation, more precarious every day.
Blather about an “information war,” in late August, 2006, is utter, complete, irrefutable crap. You can’t spin slaughter and confusion. Trying just makes you look insane. And that’s what both Charles Bird and Donald Rumsfeld are hamfistedly trying to do. Disgraceful.
What follows is an accurate chronology of United States involvement in the arming of Iraq during the Iraq-Iran war 1980-88. It is a powerful indictment of the president Bush administration attempt to sell war as a component of his war on terrorism. It reveals US ambitions in Iraq to be just another chapter in the attempt to regain a foothold in the Mideast following the fall of the Shah of Iran.
From
Arming Iraq: A Chronology of U.S. Involvement
Whatever his complexes, Khomeini had no qualms about sending his followers, including young boys, off to their deaths for his greater glory. This callous disregard for human life was no less characteristic of Saddam Hussein. And, for that matter, it was also no less characteristic of much of the world community, which not only couldn’t be bothered by a few hundred thousand Third World corpses, but tried to profit from the conflict.
From:
The United States and Iran-Iraq War 1980-1988
Anarch and…oh, hell, practically everyone else: why do you think he was referring to you? Are you, personally, appeasing terrorists? Or doing any of the other things Rumsfeld says won’t work?
the american right-wing is in denial.
the united states is just not trusted, especially in the middle east.
And now I can’t help but be reminded of past disputes over David Neiwert’s theories on so-called pseudo-fascism and the modern American right.
*cough*
Slarti- Actually I think you and Charles are my best weapons here. I know Rumsfeld wasn’t refering to me, the trouble comes when I try to think of someone he could be refering to. Not even the dastardly 9-11 widows seem to fit.
“Anarch and…oh, hell, practically everyone else: why do you think he was referring to you? Are you, personally, appeasing terrorists? Or doing any of the other things Rumsfeld says won’t work?”
It’s OK guys, Rummy was talking about me. I’m appeasing the terrorists. Relax, y’all.
Meanwhile, Slarti, I think you were asked a question which you haven’t answered – besides me, who was Rummy talking about?
You know, this is a big country, but it doesn’t cover the ENTIRE world.
I’m not sure who Rumsfeld is talking about, either, but I’m reasonably certain he isn’t talking about me.
Meanwhile, Slarti, I think you were asked a question which you haven’t answered – besides me, who was Rummy talking about?
Ok, he was talking about me, after all. The rest of you can go home.
I haven’t seen the unanswered-question gambit in a while. Nicely done!
CB: Probably more significant than the actual nerve gas and mustard gas was the diplomatic cover we provided them. But of course our acts of war against Iran do not begin with our fomenting the Iraq-Iran War, but go at least as far back to 1953.
Probably more significant than the actual nerve gas and mustard gas was the diplomatic cover we provided them.
Don’t forget the green light for the invasion itself from Carter. (Haig memo scanned in here.)
That’s why this has always been my favorite part of Bush’s 2003 SOTU:
Uh, since Saddam asked for permission to invade Iran?
“But to go a bit further, since Sebastian was arguing against the idea that the notion [of imminent threat was a key part of the argument] was a ‘complete fabrication’ and he lost, it raises the question of what evidence or argument would have him actually abandon that notion.”
Seriously liberal_japonicus, do you read your own links? I lost on complete fabrication because there were two instances of it found in the runup. As I discussed in the posts you linked, Bush specifically argued against an imminent threat standard in the State of the Union Speech.
The State of the Union address is the most listened to political speech of non-campaigns.
Look, I don’t even like Rumsfeld at all. I think he completely screwed up multiple stages of the war and has played all sorts of stupid games that haven’t helped us.
But that doesn’t mean you get to just make up what he is saying.
That’s just crazy talk, Sebastian.
Yes, people, calm down. Rumsfeld was doing his funny sarcastic voice throughout the speech. You don’t get that from reading it, but he didn’t actually mean a word of it. (And anything he did mean was referring to imaginary people — people he knows to be imaginary — so nothing to worry about.)
Whatever, Sebastian. If you think you only lost that debate cause you had ‘complete’ instead of ‘partial’, bearing in mind there has been another 3 years of mismanagement and revelations of fixing the intelligence to generate the result, there’s not much I can say that is going to change your mind, which is precisely why your asides are viewed (at least by me) with a certain amount of suspicion. My take is that you start out from these overarching positions like ‘complete fabrication’ and contest every trench so that these discussions are less exchanges of views and more wars of attrition. Why this is, I have no idea, but you are quite sure it is because I don’t like you. That says a lot more about you than it does about me, I’m afraid.
So if I have this right, the Secretary of Defense was giving a big ol’ stemwinder about four or five of his more timid imaginary friends, and we shouldn’t take his rhetoric as having anything to do with anyone who actually has anything to do with U.S. government policy. OK, then. I feel better already.
Just what would you consider an effective rebuttal?
When out of ammo, best to avoid the specific and generalise.
Anarch and…oh, hell, practically everyone else: why do you think he was referring to you? Are you, personally, appeasing terrorists? Or doing any of the other things Rumsfeld says won’t work?
Oy vey. Slart, this question only makes sense if you proceed from the assumption that Rumsfeld would never *gasp* misrepresent the position of people who disagree with him. And, not to speak for everyone else here, but I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that that assumption is not universally shared.
“Whatever, Sebastian. If you think you only lost that debate cause you had ‘complete’ instead of ‘partial’, bearing in mind there has been another 3 years of mismanagement and revelations of fixing the intelligence to generate the result, there’s not much I can say that is going to change your mind, which is precisely why your asides are viewed (at least by me) with a certain amount of suspicion. My take is that you start out from these overarching positions like ‘complete fabrication’ and contest every trench so that these discussions are less exchanges of views and more wars of attrition. Why this is, I have no idea, but you are quite sure it is because I don’t like you. That says a lot more about you than it does about me, I’m afraid.”
How precisely does 3 years of revelations shed light on what the fact that Bush argued against an “imminent threat” standard in the State of the Union address before the invasion?
And the rest is just your typical rudeness, which indeed says plenty about you. But since you argue that such rudeness is a necessary tactic over at http://www.hocb.net, I suppose I must applaud your ruthlessness.
“Anarch and…oh, hell, practically everyone else: why do you think he was referring to you? Are you, personally, appeasing terrorists? Or doing any of the other things Rumsfeld says won’t work?”
Are you joking? By his definition I am absolutely, absolutely doing that. I mention Abu Ghraib more than medal of freedom winners, harp on and on about rendition, constantly criticize “arguably the best run detention center in the history of warfare”. He is absolutely referring to me, and a number of other people I know who do the same stuff more effectively.
I mean, please, I am everything they hate. Practically central casting. Unfortunately I can’t illustrate without getting too autobiographical.
So. The AP interprets Rumsfeld to be attacking critics of administration policy on Iraq. As do most readers of English.
But to Slartibartfast, Charles, and other right wingers, he’s so clearly not doing that that the AP characterization can be treated as shoddy, malicious reporting.
If that’s true, then Slarti and Charles ought to be able to give some plausible answer to the question of who Rumsfeld was referring to.
So far, nothing.
At the risk of Godwin, Slarti, when Hitler & co. were railing against “the people controlling the banking industry” (more usually abbreviated as “the bankers”) do you think the only people being referring to were the upper echelon financiers?
*referred to, sorry.
And while I’m on the subject: do you think the repeated invocations of “states rights” in the 1950s and ’60s was genuinely decrying the abhorrent state of Tenth Amendment law?
Here’s an excerpt, by the way:
Who do you think is responsible for the “moral and intellectual confusion” that strengthens our enemies? He is talking about administration critics on the war. He is especially talking about journalists, their sources, human rights organizations, lawyers, law school and college professors. Do you honestly not understand why I think he’s talking about me?
See #3: Be Deliberately Obtuse
“And as we’ve seen — even this month — in Lebanon, they design attacks and manipulate the media to try to demoralize public opinion. They doctor photographs of casualties. They use civilians as human shields. And then they try to provoke an outcry when civilians are killed in their midst, which of course was their intent.”
Do you believe this to be false?
I hadn’t actually read Rumsfeld’s speech. Judging from Katherine’s excerpt, it’s obvious he’s referring to the people Katherine mentions.
So I suggest we close this thread down and move on to something where there might be a legitimate difference of opinion.
No, of course I don’t believe it’s false. But in the context of this speech, it is clearly an attempt to say that those who participate in the outcry when civilians are killed are appeasing terrorists.
Terrorists absolutely have a media strategy to inspire overreaction and brutality and civilian deaths. But to think that the way to counter that is for American liberals to just shut up about brutality and civilian deaths is utterly delusional, and a personal attack on American liberals.
Charley has said it before: they’re much too worried about the near enemy–people like me–to be effective against the far enemy. Their public diplomacy is directed at swing Congressional districts. They couldn’t care less about how it plays in Brooklyn, let alone Europe, let alone Muslim countries.
And when people attack people I know and like, even if it’s just rhetorically attacking and I don’t actually know them all that well, my response is not to pretend it’s not happening and attacking the Associated Press for making glaringly obvious inferences.
ok, way past bedtime.
Uh, since Saddam asked for permission to invade Iran?
…not to mention, he then asked Bush I to approve his invasion of Kuwait. Surprisingly realpolitikal, surprisingly predictable for a tyrannical dictator, that Saddam.
Sebastian, in light of your defense of Rummy’s straw men, I would think you would pay closer attention to Bush’s.
In that State of the Union speech, the entire paragraph in question is couched as a response to a straw man critic who argues that the threat isn’t imminent.
Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late.
It says absolutely nothing about whether Bush himself contends that the threat is imminent or not. Your use of this paragraph is therefore specious.
Gregory Djerejian has an excellent post up about this, Unity, Then and Now
Makes all you wanna be Rumsfeld apologists look like wet nappies.
Used wet nappies.
I don’t doubt that photographs were doctored, that in some cases Hezbollah used people as human shields, and I also don’t doubt that Israel was guilty of major war crimes in Lebanon.
The NYT had a story on Friday August 25 by Hassan Fattah about a Sunni village where the people complained of Hezbollah using them as human shields. It’s convincing. The story also tells what happened to civilians who finally left town. One car broke down, an Israeli gunboat shelled them and then Israeli helicopters fired on it with rockets and machine guns, killing 23 people. Hezbollah doesn’t play any role in this final part of the story and the person who tells it was a woman who condemned Hezbollah for moving into their village. She also lost her father, brother and several other family members to the Israeli attack.
You know, if people would like to move beyond this notion of “information warfare” and just tell the d*** truth instead, it would be a nice change. Rumsfeld isn’t telling the whole truth–he’s a propagandist trying to cover up the crimes of one side by reciting the crimes of the other.
You know, if people would like to move beyond this notion of “information warfare” and just tell the d*** truth instead, it would be a nice change.
Ha! It’s like asking a leopard to change its spots.
Sebastian:
liberal japonicus,
The “imminent threat” crap is surely one of the stupidest arguments that’s ever taken place in the history of American politics. But the background to it actually is interesting. In particular, the passage from the 2003 SOTU Sebastian cited is a great illustration of deceptive political rhetoric. If I were a history teacher I’d use it in a class.
First of all, read literally, Bush clearly did not “specifically argue” against an imminent threat standard. In fact, from a legal standpoint it would have essentially been impossible for him to have done so. However, it’s certain that passage was carefully crafted by his speechwriters to give the impression he did. Here’s why:
The imminent threat standard is fairly established in international law. For the Bush administration to explicitly discard it would have been a gigantic repudiation of international norms, and created a precedent that we certainly wouldn’t want others to believe they could follow.
At the same time, the idea Iraq was an imminent threat to the U.S. was a tough sell. So the September, 2002 National Security Strategy made the following case (obviously directed at Iraq):
1. Nations have a right to defend themselves against an imminent threat.
2. Current technology makes it possible for countries to do great damage to others without mobilizing armies, etc.
3. Therefore, the concept of what constitutes an imminent threat should be broadened: “We must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries.”
This isn’t scary sounding enough for a State of the Union address, though—particularly when UN inspectors were in Iraq, and the idea it was an imminent threat to us was appearing more and more ridiculous.
So Bush’s speechwriters were stuck. They couldn’t repudiate the imminent threat standard. But they still had to come up with verbiage justifying the war about to happen. And they came up with this:
Given what they had to work with, this a good job. You start out with “Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent.” The implication is that Bush disagrees. But he never says so. Instead, his next sentence has no literal connection with one before: “Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike?” Of course, a requirement that countries wait until adversaries politely announce they’re about to strike has never been part of the imminent threat standard. Nor were countries required to trust Saddam Hussein, or wait until it was “too late.” You could obviously repudiate that standard without repudiating the imminent threat standard.
Thus, they were able to have it both ways: not repudiating the imminent threat standard (since they couldn’t), but also making people not paying attention think they somehow had.
I guarantee that if we ever get access to the papers of the White House Iraq Group, there will be a memo in there discussing what they were doing, and why.
(theo, I see you explained this in a far more concise way than me.)
I find this more typical rudeness.
But that doesn’t mean you get to just make up what he is saying.
but maybe that’s just me (and perhaps Slart agrees, but I’m never too sure). On the other hand, I think inferring if I like you or not (and given that I don’t know you except from words on a screen, some people might call that mindreading) is less rudeness and more an indication of the vacuousness of your arguments. Believe it or not, success in the Middle East will not hinge on whether you are liked or not.
I am unable to believe the Bush administration cares about winning the Information War. If they did, they’d have someone more experienced than Karen Hughes overseeing international diplomacy and public affairs.
(Of course, she’s also the beneficiary of the usual cronyism, but if they really cared they’d choose a real expert.)
Karen of Arabia’s personal Information War was primarily targeted at Americans, because we’re the only ones who haven’t yet made up our minds (although, increasingly, we have).
The US has already completely lost the hearts and minds of the rest of the developed world (Spaniards view the US as more dangerous than Iran), never mind the “Arab Street.” The only thing that could influence them is actions, in particular the direct repudiation of Bush’s policies.
At this point, the Information War is irrelevant except for domestic politics, and it astonishes me that some conservatives aren’t Realist enough to see this.
“Believe it or not, success in the Middle East will not hinge on whether you are liked or not.”
Really? Oh my God! Now I have to re-evaluate everything!
As for your link to our previous conversation–
You:
“Invoking the notion that you previously suggested is an artifact of looking at the world thru the lens of American culture suggests that this was just snark with no serious point.”
Me:
“Huh? I suggested (rightly or wrongly) that the idea that hypocrisy seriously degrades authority is largely American rather than a universal understanding. How does noting that you don’t need much moral authority to recognize Saddam’s problems undercut that in any way? How does the idea that you don’t need much moral authority to recognize genocide (though apparently more moral authority than found in almost any current national government) undercut that? I really don’t understand your point unless it is just “I don’t like Sebastian”.”
I’ll be shorter this time:
Your snarky comment makes absolutely no logical sense in the context of the discussion.
And you are the person slinging mud about vacuous arguments. Wow. Just. Wow.
Theo and Jon (S), great stuff.
What strikes me as odd about the broad outlines of QandO’s complaint (and, by extension, the complaint of several individuals here) is that “critics of the Bush administration’s Iraq and counterterrorism policies” is itself such an amorphous and generic term to start with. Even before you get to what some here like to call “mind reading” and I like to call putting 2 and 2 together, the AP story is more or less tautological. Those mysterious folks who might argue for appeasement with terrorists, whether they exist outside Rumsfeld’s fevered mind or not, would by definition be critical of the administration’s policies, would they not?
OT: via boing boing: presidential hopeful Mark Warner targets the g33k constituency.
Sebastian,
if you want to believe that invoking the imagined fact that I hate you constitutes a way of saying ‘I don’t understand your point’, I’m not sure if I can help you. Introducing what I like or dislike is pretty shoddy argumentation, and I certainly hope you are capable of better, though your comment about me ‘making up’ what other people say would argue against that.
Jon S,
I agree, but we also have to add the effects of the 1% doctrine, which, by lowering the threshold of how we view the possibility of an attack, imminent threat is anything with a 1% possibility of happening.
Because Fleisher said it once (and mistakenly so) in a press gaggle, therefore that single reference must have represented the entire administration’s position on imminence, even though Bush and others never used the term. Not that they didn’t describe Saddam’s Iraq as a threat or a growing threat or a gathering threat, etc.
So, suddenly the correct parsing of administration statements isn’t important?
When they don’t use the word “imminent”, it’s just putting words in their mouth to suggest that’s what they meant. When they do – well they must have been mistaken!
The question was designed to clarify the administration’s stand on invading Iraq. It’s a hell of a mistake to say “absolutely!” when what he really should have said was “no.” That’s a howler.
If he was mistaken, could you link me some retraction Ari (or the administration) made of his statement? If not, then your contention that he was mistaken is an empty assertion. And to make such a mistake, then not correct it, in such a way as to make a false impression – that’s deceit in most people’s books.
A little perspective, Phil. In the 1980s, we provided a whopping 0.6% of total weaponry to Saddam. Some backing indeed.
Ah. So if you only support evil a little bit, that makes you less evil? Interesting coming from a self-professed Christian.
We slightly favored Iraq ‘
From Wikipedia:
“Slightly favored” my ass.
because the Khomeini regime had long before stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held your fellow Americans hostage, and the U.S. did not want this fundamentalist mullahocracy to expand beyond its borders.
1) My father was on active duty in the US Army, stationed in Germany, at the time of the hostage-taking in Iran, so I’m painfully aware of the event and its potential repercussions.
2) You remember why that happened, right? Hint: 1953.
We chose what was thought the lesser evil at the time.
And that makes it aaaaaaaaaaaaall OK!
You and Ara should save your condemnation for Russia, China and France, which provided 85% of Saddam’s arsenal.
I don’t live in any of those countries nor do my taxes support their governments’ activities, hotshot. I prefer to worry about countries whose leaders purport to represent me on the world stage and whose governments I can vote for.
BTW, again from Wikipedia:
See, there’s more to warmaking than providing an arsenal, which is in fact a major part of your own argument right here in this post, so why you’d want to back away from that idea when it’s inconvenient to you is somewhat strange.
Oh, wait — no it isn’t.
Rummy offered to quit twice. More informed appraisal of his competence cannot be assumed : I accept his take.
Whining about truthfulness by this administration is so ludicrous as to leave a bad taste in one’s mouth : the bile of rage at being taken for such a fool.
There are some reasonable people around. Check out American Footprints Aug 30 Calmer Than You Are by Eric Martin.
And, to wrap that up, if you don’t think that backing, funding and supplying a country’s enemy in a war that costs that country a million casualties, vs. jihadist actions that have cost the US fewer than 5,000 lives, occupy the same “moral plane,” your opinions on anything moral are essentially ignorable.
As for the three — or more? — of you seriously trying to argue that:
— in a campaign season
— in a speech before the American legion
— when the White House has already announced an election season strategy of hammering on Iraq and terrorism to help support Republican candidates,
that the implied targets of Rumsfeld’s crafty rhetorical questions were anyone other than Democrats generally, administration critics specifically, and Iraq war opponents even more specifically, you are either unable to recognize rhetoric when you see it, painfully deluded, or willfully letting yourself be deceived for reasons known only to you.
Bill Frist to Powerline, via Greenwald:
Anyone going to argue he’s not accusing people like me of “giving the enemy the playbook” and threatening the security of the American people?
The fall session of Congress could be quite edifying.
Charles, you do realise, don’t you, that Rumsfeld set up a propaganda department, the Office of Strategic Influence, all the way back in October 2001? You do also realise, don’t you, that even after that was supposedly shut down in 2002 the Information Operations Task Force in Baghdad carried on its work, including paying the Lincoln Group to plant false stories in the Iraqi media and directly taking over newspapers or paying them to run puff pieces?
Really? You are, by Rumsfeld’s speech, doing one of the following?
* Appeasing extremists
* Maintaining that peace can be negotiated with extremists
* Maintaining that the terrorist problem is one of law enforcement
* Maintaining that America is the source of the world’s problems
If so, yes, you can assume that his words are directed at you, and that he absolutely disagrees with your position.
I submit that maybe, just maybe, he’s talking about the media, and folks who publicly make remarks similar to “gulag of our times”. If you’re one of those, you’re certainly who Rumsfeld is referring to. There’s responsible opposition, and then there’s the headless chicken variety. If you’re doing the headless chicken (which I don’t think you are, just to be clear) then he’s not talking about you. If on the other hand your aim is to subvert, why is it offensive when someone calls you a subversive?
Unless you’re volunteering that he IS talking about you, in which case: knock yourself out.
If you define ‘victory’ as holding both houses in November, the government’s new offensive might end up being ‘information war’ enough. For all the bluster, neither the President nor his senior people have convinced me that they care more about success in the Middle East than they do about success in Congress.
An information war aimed at me that doesn’t even aspire to that goal is going to fail. An information war aimed at moderate or fence-sitting Muslims in the Middle East that doesn’t aspire to that goal is going to fail too. If the goal is to rally the faithful — well, it strikes me as a pretty pitiful information war if what Rumsfeld and Bush are trying to do is rally American Legion members to stick with them.
CB, wake me up when the President is prepared to even pretend that he cares enough about winning the “WAMI” to try to rally his domestic opposition (and fence-sitters). Keep in mind that none of his domestic opposition opposes him because they agree with the goals of the Islamists, because they are afraid to confront Islamism, or because they don’t know how awful the radical Islamists can be.
Whoops.
If you’re doing the headless chicken (which I don’t think you are, just to be clear) then he is talking about you.
Even preview is not my friend.
Slarti, those four items are accusations that have been levelled by conservatives at liberals in general, non-stop for the past five years. it is utterly absurd for anyone to read his comments and think Rumsfeld is using the same words, the same accusations, the same rhetoric, but means something different.
So, cleek, your point of contention is that he’s talking about you simply because he’s talked about you in the same way in the past?
Ok, then. Of course, the clues that Rumsfeld cleverly hid about who he is talking about go undiscovered. Sneaky bastard. Here’s a hint:
I’m not defending Rumsfeld so much as pointing out that, well, McQ is right, and you’re headless and flapping.
Slarti,
“Doubtless true, but when someone quotes me, and then makes silly remarks about reading comprehension, I typically come to the conclusion it is.
Who is “someone”?”
You. Here.
Golly, Slart. Katherine’s certainly written more than ten times as many words about US abuses of prisoners than about any given US military hero. You’re all happy with Rumsfeld calling her morally confused and an appeaser of vicious extremists? If so, that seems uncivil of you. If not, I can’t figure out what principled means you’re using to distinguish responsible critics of the administration, like, say, Katherine, from Rumsfeld’s targets.
It’s simply not a defense of Rumsfeld’s rhetoric to say that his claim that critics of the administration are morally confused appeasers was only meant to apply to those that really are, rather than to slander those that aren’t.
Ok, Dantheman, it really is all about you.
If this is what you’re arguing for, you win.
I’m not defending Rumsfeld so much as pointing out that, well, McQ is right, and you’re headless and flapping.
sorry, Slarti, you’re both wrong. Rumsfeld certainly talks about more than the media and Amnesty Intl. in his speech; for example, try looking at the section preceding the one you quoted; he’s talking about administration critics. oh sure, he refers to them as “some”, in much the same way his boss refers to his strawman enemies as “some”, but it’s clearly a strawman meant to represent administration critics.
and, no, just because his critics haven’t actually proposed negotiating with alQ (or appeasing them, or going for a law-enforcement-only approach, etc.) doesn’t mean BushCo hasn’t been saying, for five years, that negotiating with alQ is exactly what they want to do.
Katherine is not the newspapers, unless I’ve missed something crucial. But if Katherine’s used rhetoric similar to “gulag of our times”, she’s exactly who Rumsfeld is talking about.
Rumsfeld is saying that one cannot be critical of the administration where, exactly?
Seeing as I’m unlikely to convince you AND vice versa, here’s what I propose:
You’re of course free to take offense at anything anyone says, even if it’s not about you. I don’t think it’s about you. Sebastian doesn’t think it’s about you (by appearances, anyway). Doubtless there are some people who do think it’s about you, but it’s, as far as I can see, mostly you.
I get that you’re committed to it being about you, even if it’s not, particularly. So: enjoy. There are other ways you could enjoy it, like (for instance) having a good bit of fun with the (possibly) unintended self-criticism (see the “moral confusion” section, and what preceded it), but I’m not one to advise others on how to play with their toys.
via Making Light:
“If you want to get some idea of the resources being devoted to falsifying and suppressing legitimate public discourse, consider that paid professionals are being hired to post agenda-pushing comments on midrange blogs.”
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007935.html#007935
see the links there.
If Slartibartfast, Holsclaw and Bird really were professional astroturf commenters, being paid by Ken Mehlman’s cut-outs, would they sound any different?
I don’t think so. Nor would they work any more assiduously to undercut legitimate discourse through shameless stalling, misdirection, obfuscation, and lies.
As one of the links on Making Light says–more reason not to feed the trolls.
Fed Up, let me put this more into Rumsfeld’s construction:
Some blog commenters are paid shills, or even worse, unpaid shills, looking to disrupt and obfuscate with idiotic foolishness and misdirection. Should serious people pay any attention to them? My goodness, no.
I agree with you, CC, but maybe not in a way you’d like.
Can I just go on record as saying that anyone who uses the word ‘Fauxtography’ should be fine for crimes against the english language? Is our culture so intellectually dead that the only way to make your propoganda points stick is to condense them into a single invented word? Are we too lazy for bumper stickers?
I’d say yes.
Most of the folks may disagree with CB on a regular basis, but slamming pretty much every one of the conservative front page posters of ObWi as professional astroturfers (or sound-alikes) is a bit absurd.
OK, not a bit absurd.. patently absurd.
Republican propaganda shall henceforth be referred to as “information”.
Republican propaganda changed to fit the needs of the moment shall also be referred to as “information”.
“Information” shall be referred to as whatever the Administration says.
Democrat and American media propaganda shall henceforth be referred to as “spin” or “bias”.
Islamist propaganda shall henceforth be referred to as “propaganda”.
I shall learn of the differences by reading Charles’ posts because the typeface at QandO is beyond my squinting abilities.
Can I just go on record as saying that anyone who uses the word ‘Fauxtography’ should be fine for crimes against the english language?
Charles’ efforts with portmanteaus (portmanteaux?) have been noted previously, and they are simply accepted like Reverend Spooner’s ‘shoving leopards’.
John: if the font is too small, I just select some text, press control and rotate the scroll wheel on my mouse downpage. There’s probably another way to do it.
So far, I’ve bounced around to a few conservative blogs (including nicedoggie.net, which I haven’t visited in some time and probably won’t for even a longer period) and National Review’s The Corner, and haven’t seen anyone who thinks Rumsfeld was talking about Democrats in general, or even any substantial subset of Democrats. Not one. If you’re seeing any who are high-fiving each other over Rumsfeld’s put-down of the Ancient Enemy, let me know.
So, I repeat: no one thinks he’s talking about you but you. Although I can imagine that no one could be replaced with few.
Salrti,
“If this is what you’re arguing for, you win.”
Goody. What’s my prize? Can I get a 24 hour ban on you alleging people are having trouble with reading comprehension for reading Rumsfeld’s strawman exactly as he intended his supporters to read it?
Democrat and American media propaganda shall henceforth be referred to as “spin” or “bias”.
OT, but interesting, commentary on “Democrat” here, of all places. Nothing ground-breaking, but you take what you can get.
Has it really been a year and a half since Charles coined “democrasunami”?
No, but you can self-ban for first-degree projection.
” but you can self-ban for first-degree projection.”
Really? I said something about your reading comprehension? Cite or withdrawal with apology, please.
Thanks, Slart.
Now, that was information a guy can use.
Oh dear god. Slarti, please, for the love of god, disengage for a moment and look at the sentence you wrote:
So, cleek, your point of contention is that he’s talking about you simply because he’s talked about you in the same way in the past?
Jesus H Christ on a popsicle stick, that’s how communication works.
Seriously, I don’t know how much simpler I can say this: that’s how communication works.
Communication doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Rumsfeld did not recently spring from Zeus’ head, pristine as the driven snow. There’s a history here, a context, a pre-existing pattern, and by god, yes, if he utilizes those tropes then he’s making those references. The only alternative — which I do not for a moment credit — is that he’s so colossally stupid and inept that he failed to notice, or maybe just forgot, the way that language has been employed for the past five years. Phil gets it exactly right in the second half of his post; there is quite literally no other plausible explanation.
And I’ll note, for the record, in re this, that no, obviously I don’t think I’m appeasing the terrorists or what have you. THAT’S NOT THE POINT. The question is whether I think Rumsfeld is accusing me (and others like me) of appeasing the terrorists. Get the distinction?
Or, since maybe an illustrated example is what’s needed here, suppose a prominent Democrat (Harry Reid if you want a serious example, Michael Moore if you’re anti-fat) were to give a lengthy speech decrying “the babykillers who supported Bush’s brutal and tyrannical Iraq policy”. Suppose too that there had been a five-year campaign by progressive bloggers and liberal op-ed columnists and Democratic congressman trying to paint (i.e. smear) all pro-war people as, in fact, babykillers, replete with sober denunciations of the murderous baby-killing thugs in the White House and the monstrous Molochs in uniform and whatever happened to the serious pro-war types like William Penn? Are you honestly saying that you would think, “Oh, that’s nice, he can’t possibly be talking about me because I’ve never killed any children”?
“if you want to believe that invoking the imagined fact that I hate you constitutes a way of saying ‘I don’t understand your point’, I’m not sure if I can help you. Introducing what I like or dislike is pretty shoddy argumentation, and I certainly hope you are capable of better, though your comment about me ‘making up’ what other people say would argue against that.”
Good dodge. Were you planning on responding to the sentences before the one that sent you into a tizzy or not?
Some believe that rhetorical figleaves should be ignored when it suits their purpose of defending the Bush administration at all costs but treated as immensely significant when that is necessary to support the regime. Those people are vile hypocrites toward whom no level of contempt is sufficient.
haven’t seen anyone who thinks Rumsfeld was talking about Democrats in general, or even any substantial subset of Democrats
my first stop, Town Hall. the author starts out saying it’s all a big misrepresentation, but can’t keep up the charade. by the end he’s talking about “today’s appeasers” and how they “one by one … deserted the war they had approved and sided with the war’s early opponents”. the same column is running at the American Spectator site. (and while you’re at TownHall, be sure to check out Coulter’s latest deep analysis They Shot The Wrong Lincoln)
Sebastian, we had repeated warnings that “on any given day” Saddam could hand over nukes to Al Qaida, that we couldn’t wait for a mushroom cloud to prove he had WMDS–whether or not Bush used the word “imminent,” he certainly implied it.
This whole post seems like a recycling job. We have Rumsfeld making the usual announcements that what’s really wrong with the war is people not adopting the party line, then Charles explaining that the solution is the White House doing a better communication. The latter (as another blog pointed out) has become a running theme lately–Bush’s policies are fine, he just isn’t explaining them well enough! If he could only talk better, everyone would realize how wonderful the Iraq war is going (Kathleen Parker put a spin on this by explaining that it’s because Bush is just a plain-spoken Texas cowboy, so he doesn’t know how to handle all that high-falutin’ presidential language).
Right.
I like to think someone somewhere is writing a paper called “Relentless, Deliberate Obtuseness as Rhetorical Strategy: American ‘Conservatism,’ 2001-2006.”
I wish, oh how I wish, I were trained in rhetoric, beause I wish I knew the technical terms for the astonishingly dishonest argumentation that Seb and Slart keep making.
The tactic of interpreting phraseology in very terribly painstakingly narrow ways when it suits your political aims (“Bush himself never said Iraq was an imminent threat in so many words,” “Where exactly does Donald Rumsfeld say he’s talking about opponents of Bush’s Iraq policy?”) and then interpreting phraseology so very generously and broadly when *that* suits your political aims (what’s that Constitutional cite for Bush’s expanded war powers, again?)… I’m sure there’s a term of art for that technique in rhetoric, but I don’t know what it is.
Oh, and that bit about how we can’t possibly think Rumsfeld’s referring to opponents of Bush’s policies just because the Republican and the Right have used precisely that rhetorical device as a cudgel against opponents of Bush’s policies for the last, oh, four years… that’s rich, that is. That is so rich, so mendacious, so much an insult of any normal human’s normal comprehension skills, that it’s clear you’ve decided to give out, give up, and give in to the Newspeak campaign.
Congrats, guys. You’re in the Tweedle-dum Tweedle-dee club. Enjoy the stay there.
Since no one seems to be able to explain who Rumsfeld was referring to when he asked his rhetorical questions, I have to ask why any blame should go to the MSM for ‘misinterpreting’ his remarks? I hope we can all agree that Mr. Rumsfeld, or anyone for that matter, should take care to be much clearer when comparing anyone to Nazi appeasers as that is a horrible comparison to make.
It would be nice if Mr. Rumsfeld and his defenders had the moral courage to actually name those that he/they accuse of such cowardly actions.
“The tactic of interpreting phraseology in very terribly painstakingly narrow ways when it suits your political aims (“Bush himself never said Iraq was an imminent threat in so many words,” “Where exactly does Donald Rumsfeld say he’s talking about opponents of Bush’s Iraq policy?”) and then interpreting phraseology so very generously and broadly when *that* suits your political aims (what’s that Constitutional cite for Bush’s expanded war powers, again?)… I’m sure there’s a term of art for that technique in rhetoric, but I don’t know what it is.”
I’m not reading Bush narrowly, but I am actually reading his speech. Bush, in what is traditionally considered the most important regular speech Presidents give, did in fact use the term “imminent threat” and argued against it as the standard.
“Communication doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Rumsfeld did not recently spring from Zeus’ head, pristine as the driven snow. There’s a history here, a context, a pre-existing pattern, and by god, yes, if he utilizes those tropes then he’s making those references. The only alternative — which I do not for a moment credit — is that he’s so colossally stupid and inept that he failed to notice, or maybe just forgot, the way that language has been employed for the past five years.”
I’m willing to go along with this as a matter of interpretation but not reporting. If the interpretation is that obvious, you can just report the speech and the interpretation is there for everyone. The alternative is to report speeches which juxtapose the Iranian quest for nuclear weapons with the observation that Israel must vanish from the Middle East (with the historical context of militarily supporting groups which attack Israel) as “Ahmadinejad threatens Israel with nuclear destruction”.
The Associated Press doesn’t normally do that. (The normal method when they want to inject that kind of commentary on a political speech is along the lines of “Important Person X reacts to the speech by Y”.) So in the Ahmadinejad example, they might say “Israel decries threats”.
Bush, in what is traditionally considered the most important regular speech Presidents give, did in fact use the term “imminent threat” and argued against it as the standard.
This is blithering nonsense. First, it’s just flatly untrue, as has been explained clearly upthread. Second, asserting that in a given speech, Bush didn’t say X, has nothing whatsoever to do with whether he or his agents said X on other occasions.
I’m willing to go along with this as a matter of interpretation but not reporting. If the interpretation is that obvious, you can just report the speech and the interpretation is there for everyone.
As is this. You can’t summarize or paraphrase anything without understanding it’s meaning. Where, as here, its meaning is obvious, it is straight reporting to paraphrase it according to that obvious meaning.
Unless your suggestion is meant as a claim that reporting on a speech in any fashion other than direct quotation is improper (a claim that would itself be ridiculous), it’s nonsensical.
Me: Rumsfeld didn’t say that.
Chorus: Sure he did. He said it before.
Me: But he didn’t say it this time.
Chorus: But that’s what he meant.
Me: But how do you know?
Chorus: We just do. We can’t think of another explanation, even though you’ve pointed some out. And you’re a bootlicking administration apologist, a toady and a shill for suggesting that we’re unreasonable.
Me: Even assuming all of that is true, how does that make your point?
It’s like arguing with a bunch of Creationists.
CaseyL- Isn’t it straining at gnats and swallowing camels?
Blue- Agreed, Rumsfeld is obviously a moral coward. I’d say he lacks moral authority but Seb and Slarti have made it clear they dont believe in it right now.
Jon(S)- Good idea I’d read it.
KCinDC- So Delightful I’ll say it too: Some believe that rhetorical figleaves should be ignored when it suits their purpose of defending the Bush administration at all costs but treated as immensely significant when that is necessary to support the regime. Those people are vile hypocrites toward whom no level of contempt is sufficient.
Jeff Eaton- You said, “Most of the folks may disagree with CB on a regular basis, but slamming pretty much every one of the conservative front page posters of ObWi as professional astroturfers (or sound-alikes) is a patently absurd.”
Why is that? Just because it would leave the rest of us looking dumb? I’m not convinced that they are paid shills even though Slarti has admitted to it, but thats mainly because I don’t think their arguments are a credit to the Republican party especially now.
Frank, just in case you or anyone else didn’t get the joke, I of course don’t believe that, for example, Slarti or Sebastian are “vile hypocrites toward whom no level of contempt is sufficient”.
As they’ve demonstrated, it would clearly be unreasonable for anyone to take offense at my statement. My goodness, how could anyone object to it?
Slart: I missed the comment in which you explicitly listed who Rumsfeld meant to refer to as the some who suffer from moral confusion and wish to appease vicious terrorists.
Here, LizardBreath.
Just to try to keep this stuff straight, Charles and Sebastian are arguing that the AP story misrepresented what Rumsfeld said by saying he was leveling those charges at administration critics, while Slart is saying that Rumsfeld only meant critics like AI and the press, but not critics like Katherine. Is that right?
Or is Slart, too, saying “administration critics” is an unreasonable inference to draw from Rumsfeld’s talk of appeasement and forgetting history?
And is anyone going to respond to Jon (S)’s cite in which the White House more or less accepts the AP’s interpretation?
“Some believe that rhetorical figleaves should be ignored when it suits their purpose of defending the Bush administration at all costs but treated as immensely significant when that is necessary to support the regime. Those people are vile hypocrites toward whom no level of contempt is sufficient.”
Since I’m not one of those people, I’m not taking offense. 🙂
I missed that, too. Not that it’s incumbent on me to make such a list.
Slart:
By this standard, no one could ever be held to account for anything they say, as long as their rhetoric is somewhat short of explicit. As others have pointed out, you’re completely ignoring the ways in which language is normally used and interpreted. When Rumsfeld asks:
One wonders, why is he asking this? It would seem to be unneccessary unless he believes that there are people who believe this. Who are they? In the absence of any specific referents, we are left to infer the answer based on context and prior behavior. Rumsfeld’s history of this sort of rhetoric towards opponents of the war has been noted by others. As for context, this is pretty clearly part of a campaign by the administration to paint their opponents as weak-kneed appeasers. Cheney recently used very similar language in a speech – “This is not an enemy that can be ignored, or negotiated with, or appeased.” Coincidence? I think not.
I have a lot of respect for both Seb and Slart. They’re generally willing to engage their opponents in a forum where they are outnumbered, and generally do so with an impressive degree of honesty and fair-mindedness. But with each post to this thread, my estimation of them drops a notch.
Slart:
Hugh Hewitt seems to have a bit of a spring in his step here.
You know what I think would be fun? I think it would be fun to go through Bush’s SOTU speeches, and look for places where he specifically said something, but then, through his subsequent statements and actions, and those of Administration officials, clearly indicated that he meant or believed something else. Don’t you think that would be fun, Sebastian? I sure do.
Circular. He’s simply underscoring that Rumsfeld is in fact talking about appeasers, which is already pretty clear.
Again, if you’re an appeasement kind of guy, matttb, then Rumsfeld is talking about you. And I agree with him on this particular point.
On the other hand, if you’re thinking that Rumsfeld is saying “if you’re a Democrat, you’re an appeaser” then I don’t think that’s supportable.
Charles, at the risk of repeating an argument that someone else made, there are two main problem with the war room idea:
1) They already try, and they aren’t very good at it.
2) Nobody believes them – Hezbollah is more credible than the Bush administration at this point.
To whomever runs this blog: This “Charles” guy really detracts from an otherwise interesting site. I think it’s a terrific idea to have somebody with a conservative slant among your authors. But couldn’t you find one whose repertoire extends beyond hairsplitting and straw men?
Slarti, are you seriously claiming, before God — and, more importantly, before me — that Donald Rumsfeld and the Bush Administration have not engaged in a consistent pattern of referring to the Democrats as appeasers, and that when he therefore uses the word “appeasers” during this speech, in this context, before this audience, in a campaign season, that he is not referring to Democrats? Really? You don’t think that these people have ever attributed to war opponents positions that they don’t hold, such as the desire for appeasement?
If I’m ever accused of a crime, I want you as my attorney. You clearly don’t believe there are any such things as patterns of behavior, or of using someone’s prior statements to help either support or impeach their testimony, or any of that stuff. What’s more, you appear to think you can convince others of this. That’s gold in front of a jury, folks.
Yawn..
When the Associated Press squanders half a trillion dollars of our federal reserve money to make Iran the most powerful country in the mideast get back to me.
When Reuters starts locking up American citizens for years without filing charges or allowing right of counsel drop me a line.
And when Donald Rumsfeld his finally held accountable for his pathetic performance over the past three years call me a paramedic.
McQ’s constant whining about the press got old over a year ago. Not to mention his very selective choices.
Rumsfeld and his speechwriters aren’t idiots. He makes sure to leave just a sliver of plausible deniability in this rant.
Slart: I’m going to highlight a portion of what I already quoted from Hewitt’s post: “The policies proposed by today’s Democrats and promoted by a chorus of modern Geoffrey Dawsons in the MSM –as editor of the Times of London, Dawson was appeasement’s mouthpiece– are certainly as destructive of the nation’s security as were those of the Baldwin/Chamberlain governments, but like the men of those governments, the appeasers of today are certainly patriots, just deeply misguided, foolish patriots.”
Hewitt sure seems convinced Rumsfeld considers the Democratic leadership and MSM to be these ‘modern day appeasers’. You’ve just said you agree with his particular point on appeasers.
So, which Democratic policies constitute ‘appeasing’ fascism?
And BTW, I’m no Democrat, for obvious reasons.
These ‘appeasers’ must be rooted out. I suggest Rumsfeld be waterboarded until he divulges their identities.
“that Donald Rumsfeld and the Bush Administration have not engaged in a consistent pattern of referring to the Democrats as appeasers, and that when he therefore uses the word “appeasers” during this speech, in this context, before this audience, in a campaign season, that he is not referring to Democrats? Really?”
Actually, given recent history and diplomatic spats (in which Rumsfeld was involved) I would have guessed that he meant European governments, not Democrats.
(Funny side note, I thought three times about whether or not it was appropriate to say “Democrats” here even though Phil used it). You’ve got me almost trained. 😉
Yes, Sebastian, that’s the response I figured you’d give in the present context. It’s possible, however, that if presented with a similar statement at a different time in a different thread, you’d react like most humans, who have years of experience in the way language actually works, rather than like a science-fiction robot.
Which is the point that Rummy’s staunch defenders seem to be (deliberately?) ignoring.
I’ll second Gromit’s suggestion that people should check out Jon(S)’s
link. This is clearly part of a strategic campaign by the White House to recapture some momentum on National Security and to put the Democrats back on the defensive. Parsing Rumsfeld’s remarks without acknowledging this is simply disingenuous.
Fred Kaplan’s piece is also worth reading.
Oh, and I forgot to provide a link to the Cheney speech.
OK, Phil, more than slightly favored. The U.S. had a policy had preferred that Iran and Iraq beat each other up rather than extend their belligerence to neighboring countries. The policy worked because both Iran and Iraq obliged. The Iraqis who held the mostly French, Chinese and Russian arms that killed Iranians were Iraqis, not Americans. In normal circles, you blame the person firing the gun (or their boss for giving the orders), not America first. The U.S. should be a ways down the line if you want address responsibility, with Saddam at the head, followed more distantly by China, Russia and France, but I guess “blame America 5th or 6th” just doesn’t have the same ring.
You remember why that happened, right? Hint: 1953.
Yes, I do, Phil. Ever hear of a thing called free will? So the only recourse to 1953 was to storm sovereign U.S. territory and hold American citizens hostage? So two wrongs make a right? Or is it that we just had it coming, just like the poor girl who showed a little too much leg to the rapist? The Iranians had a choice here.
And that makes it aaaaaaaaaaaaall OK!
Right. Because it would have been so much better for the greater evil–fresh from its fundamentalist revolution–to overrun Iraq, no? Is it your position that risking an Iranian takeover of Iraq would’ve made the world a better place?
All I am seeing is the AP reporter filling in the extremely obvious blanks in Rumsfeld’s speech.
And that’s exactly where Burns went from reporting to editorializing, dan. Rumsfeld used the word “folks” or “some quarters” to describe those who would appease terrorists, etc. Rumsfeld was being deliberately vague, setting up faceless boogeymen strawmen to bolster the points in his speech. He didn’t make a very good case, in my opinion, because he relied on those lame props. Alas. As a journalist, Burns’ responsibility should have been to inquire further as to who in particular Rumsfeld was referring. Instead, Burns took the lazy, biased route. AP changed the content of the piece for a reason, because Burns over-projected, as are many on this very thread. The difference is that any reader of his speech on this thread can make whatever projections he or she wants, but Robert Burns cannot because he was supposed to have adhered to a higher standard. Again, alas.
Rumsfeld did make specific charges regarding the decision makers in mainstream media and that gal at Amnesty International who made the “gulag” reference, so if no one in this thread is in either group, then he wasn’t talking to you.
Charles, you do realise, don’t you, that Rumsfeld set up a propaganda department, the Office of Strategic Influence, all the way back in October 2001? You do also realise, don’t you, that even after that was supposedly shut down in 2002 the Information Operations Task Force in Baghdad carried on its work, including paying the Lincoln Group to plant false stories in the Iraqi media and directly taking over newspapers or paying them to run puff pieces?
Yes, Ginger, I am aware of the DoD’s previous clunky attempts to engage in the media world, although the “planted” stories that I saw weren’t false. The subterfuge was stupid, and they shouldn’t have done it. If the administration is going to be competent about this information war, it should be out in the open.
If he was mistaken, could you link me some retraction Ari (or the administration) made of his statement?
If Fleisher wasn’t mistaken, shinobi, could you link to any other statement made by the administration that claimed that Saddam’s Iraq was an imminent threat? As it is, by your logic, one single solitary statement in a press gaggle negated months and months of Bush administration policy which explicitly stated that Iraq was not an imminent threat (the Bush SOTU being one of many examples). In fact, in the run-up to the war, the lack of an imminent threat was one of the reasons many on the Left (and a few on the Right) were opposed to our removal of Saddam. Please. You’re clinging to a myth.
Me: Rumsfeld didn’t say that.
Chorus: Sure he did. He said it before.
Me: But he didn’t say it this time.
Chorus: But that’s what he meant.
Me: But how do you know?
Corrected Chorus: Because he used the same language that has been employed to that task by the past five years both by people in the Administration and their political allies outside it. [And, pace Jon and Larv’s links, are more or less admitting it outright.] That he didn’t use the exact wording you prefer doesn’t make the reference any less clear.
[Slarti, you of all people should know this isn’t rocket science.]
Davebo, matttbastard, et al.: I’ve been referring to this tactic as “implausible deniability” for a number of years now. It’s predicated on the observation that as long as you don’t explicitly say what you mean — even if you creep close enough to see the depths of every pore on its fetid body — a sufficient number of people will vehemently deny that’s what you ever meant or said (regardless of how audibly you wink at the audience) and refuse to acknowledge that millions more got the message loud and clear.
The same is true of acknowledging error, incidentally; as long as you never say that you were wrong (or, more pointedly, were lying), you can’t ever be held accountable because absent a direct, signed-and-sealed confession, too many people will leap to your defense, reasonable inferrence be damned. It’s a particularly odious kind of literalism I’ve been seeing a lot of recently, and of fairly recent vintage. I can’t think of any pre-Nixon examples, to be honest, although I’m sure some must exist.
If Fleisher wasn’t mistaken, shinobi, could you link to any other statement made by the administration that claimed that Saddam’s Iraq was an imminent threat?
“We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud”? (Quoted from memory. I’m sure my wording’s inexact.) Or you could just go upthread to the link where Sebastian debated this on Dan Drezner’s blog and lost.
“Yes, Sebastian, that’s the response I figured you’d give in the present context. It’s possible, however, that if presented with a similar statement at a different time in a different thread, you’d react like most humans, who have years of experience in the way language actually works, rather than like a science-fiction robot.”
That is very probable. I’m sure I have, even.
Which brings us back to the interpretation vs. reporting thing. I haven’t called you crazy for reacting that way. Very human, totally defensible interpretation.
I’m criticizing the Associated Press for reporting it as if he directly said that–taking out the possibility of other interpretations and dramatically broadening the category of people that Rumsfeld is talking about. Even if you take a fairly broad interpretation of Rumsfeld’s comments, he isn’t talking about all critics of the Bush administration’s Iraq and terrorism policies. (Surely we can agree at the very least that McCain isn’t being called an appeaser here)? The AP summary leaves that interpretation open when it is clearly not open in the speech.
Can we close the case file now?
Pressed to support these allegations, the White House yesterday could cite no major Democrat who has proposed cutting off funds or suggested that withdrawing from Iraq would persuade terrorists to leave Americans alone. But White House and Republican officials said those are logical interpretations of the most common Democratic position favoring a timetable for withdrawing troops from Iraq.
“The same is true of acknowledging error, incidentally; as long as you never say that you were wrong (or, more pointedly, were lying), you can’t ever be held accountable because absent a direct, signed-and-sealed confession, too many people will leap to your defense, reasonable inferrence be damned. It’s a particularly odious kind of literalism I’ve been seeing a lot of recently, and of fairly recent vintage. I can’t think of any pre-Nixon examples, to be honest, although I’m sure some must exist.”
NYT Pulitzer Prize, Walter Duranty. Prize awarded 1932. Defended until well into the 1970s. The NYT still makes a token defense whenever it comes up, but their hearts aren’t in it so I won’t make the stronger claim of “defended to this very day”.
I think the problem here is that every discussion about anything related to the war on terrorism ends up as a discussion on every possible facet and perceived betrayal about it.
Yes, I supported the war in Iraq.
Yes, if I understood how unseriously Bush was going to take it I wouldn’t have.
Yes, Rumsfeld has been one of the huge problem actors.
That doesn’t mean that every single thing Rumsfeld says is wrong, nor does it mean that every negative thing he says is directed against every single person who has ever disagreed with him.
Actually, given recent history and diplomatic spats (in which Rumsfeld was involved) I would have guessed that he meant European governments, not Democrats.
Right. During campaign season. OK.
I am reminded at this point of an episode of Family Guy in which Peter, being given the opportunity to choose as a prize a new speedboat or a “Mystery Box,” chooses the box, saying: “A boat is a boat, but the Mystery Box could be anything! It could even be a boat!” It’s just about that ludicrous.
OK, Phil, more than slightly favored.
Thank you. I’ll accept that as shorthand for “I was incorrect and you were correct.”
The U.S. had a policy had preferred that Iran and Iraq beat each other up rather than extend their belligerence to neighboring countries.
Well, no, the US had a policy that Iran get the shit kicked out of it by Iraq.
In normal circles, you blame the person firing the gun (or their boss for giving the orders), not America first.
Where did I blame America first? Cripes, you’re like a sugar-addled ADHD child. I said that assisting in fomenting a war that causes a million casualties is absolutely on the same “moral plane” as jihadi activities that kill fewer than 5,000 people. Pay attention.
The U.S. should be a ways down the line if you want address responsibility, with Saddam at the head, followed more distantly by China, Russia and France, but I guess “blame America 5th or 6th” just doesn’t have the same ring.
When you find someone who isn’t blaming Iraq for their part in the Iran-Iraq war, you be sure to point them out, Charles.
So the only recourse to 1953 was to storm sovereign U.S. territory and hold American citizens hostage?
I didn’t say that, and challenge you to point to where you think I did.
So two wrongs make a right?
I didn’t say that, and challenge you to point to where you think I did.
Or is it that we just had it coming, just like the poor girl who showed a little too much leg to the rapist?
I didn’t say that, and challenge you to point to where you think I did. What’s more, your implication that I would have any such opinion concerning the crime of rape is despicable and unbecoming, not to mention slanderous, and I demand an apology.
The Iranians had a choice here.
Yes, they did. If foreign nationals helped foment a coup here in the US, Charles, how would you feel about them and their country? What actions against them might you be inclined to support?
Right. Because it would have been so much better for the greater evil–fresh from its fundamentalist revolution–to overrun Iraq, no? Is it your position that risking an Iranian takeover of Iraq would’ve made the world a better place?
You apparently don’t actually care what my position is, since you’re striving very hard via the Rumsfeld Rhetoric Trick to attribute to me positions I do not hold, to engage in the fallacy of the excluded middle, and to limit everything to two possible choices, so why don’t you actually just entertain yourself by filling in whatever answer makes you feel better?
Yes. This is a longtime, quite conscious strategy on their part. See here.
I find the depth of contempt this demonstrates on their part for Americans to be really bracing. Wilton Sekzer in Why We Fight is obviously an excellent example of how people are victimized. The ruthlessness with which they’re willing to deceive and manipulate people is really something to behold.
It’s also something to behold those who defend and enable this behavior.
To quote a certain poster here, “I don’t think it’s wise for you to go down the “fake but accurate” road.” /snark
Rumsfeld used the word “folks” or “some quarters” to describe those who would appease terrorists, etc. Rumsfeld was being deliberately vague, setting up faceless boogeymen strawmen to bolster the points in his speech.
that those strawmen came out looking exactly like those the GOP has been using for years to represent Democrats is a Total Coincidence. only a partisan attack dog, foaming up on BDS, would even think to make the connection between Rumsfeld’s strawmen and those used all the time by the rest of the GOP. Rumsfeld certainly didn’t intend anyone to make that connection, oh heavens no. that’s unthinkable. i heard he even lives and works in a perfectly-sealed bubble, where no political rhetoric can enter.
Sebastian, thanks for the clarification. I apparently haven’t been distinguishing enough in my mind between your position and Slartibartfast’s.
Charles,
“Rumsfeld was being deliberately vague, setting up faceless boogeymen strawmen to bolster the points in his speech. He didn’t make a very good case, in my opinion, because he relied on those lame props. Alas. As a journalist, Burns’ responsibility should have been to inquire further as to who in particular Rumsfeld was referring. Instead, Burns took the lazy, biased route.”
Ah, so your suggestion is that instead of using the level of reading comprehension and memory of multiple prior similar statements by Rumsfeld and other members of this Administration that God gave to fleas, before Burns filed his story, he should have (in spite of no press conference being held) asked Rumsfeld exactly who he was referring to by his “faceless boogeymen strawman”, waited for an answer, and then accepted the answer at face value. And when his superior wanted to know why no story has been filed by deadline, his response should have been…?
Rumsfeld certainly didn’t intend anyone to make that connection, oh heavens no. that’s unthinkable.
Let me just repeat this line from the WaPo article I cited above:
But White House and Republican officials said those are logical interpretations of the most common Democratic position favoring a timetable for withdrawing troops from Iraq.
This refers to Rumsfeld’s speech, btw. There’s no longer a leg to stand on for those who think otherwise, imho.
Interpreting Rumsfeld’s speech in terms of other official statements made by the administration about that speech? Mindreading foul.
Sebastian:
Robert Burns of the AP:
Where does Burns report it as if Rummy directly said it? Does “allude” mean something different than I’ve always thought it did (i.e. to make indirect reference)?
Also, don’t these same objections apply to the WaPo piece linked above? Are they also misreporting the administration’s position?
This refers to Rumsfeld’s speech, btw. There’s no longer a leg to stand on for those who think otherwise, imho.
Right. Now it’s a twofer. The admin gets to voice the logical inferences it makes about its political opponents’ positions and the base gets to get all riled up about MSM shenanigans.
Then it’s the three-day weekend and the kickoff of the campaign season. Looks like it’s gonna be fun.
Sebastian: I disagree on Duranty’s applicability to some extent — for example, his later defenders were not (AFAIK) enormously numerous, although they were influential, etc. — but yeah, I’d say that’s a fair cop. I should’ve said: such a defense being mounted by the government strikes me as novel, i.e. post-Nixonian, and flies in the face of our supposed national mistrust of governmental figures.
Jon (S): Oh, I know it’s deliberate strategy. I used to call it “The Rorschach Strategy” back in 2002 — precisely calculated ambiguity designed to let everyone see what they want to see — but I’ve come to believe that one half of that equation is wrong. IMO, the purpose is clearly to allow those who wish to be deceived to deceive themselves; that other people see different things is coincidental, or maybe even serendipitous for the strategy.
Which is what perplexes me so completely about this sort of thing: the Bush Administration is playing their followers for chumps. They’re doing all but admitting outright that they’re playing them for chumps. Who the hell would want to follow someone who holds them in that “depth of contempt”, as you said?
Charles: What cleek said, only with more bolding and profanity. Thank god I didn’t hit “Post”, huh?
[On preview] Sebastian, what KCinDC said. Thanks.
Jon(S),
Your WA Post excerpt at 10:55am is a little weird. Rumsfeld did not address the issue of cutting and running from Iraq, so I suggest that the reporters misplaced the reference to Rumsfeld because he didn’t make the allegations that Baker and VandeHei purported. What I saw in that article was a lot of politicians–on both sides–making strawman arguments and talking past each other.
1) They already try, and they aren’t very good at it.
2) Nobody believes them – Hezbollah is more credible than the Bush administration at this point.
On #1, I agree, Jon h, and that’s one of the reasons why I think Rumsfeld should have been spending more time with his family for nearly two years. On #2, to say that a terrorist organization is more credible than the Bush administration is the kind of wacko statement that gets liberals in hot water and helps them lose elections, in my opinion of course.
Gateway Pundit thinks if it walks, quacks and appeases like a useful idiot…
Charlie writes: “On #2, to say that a terrorist organization is more credible than the Bush administration is the kind of wacko statement that gets liberals in hot water and helps them lose elections, in my opinion of course.”
Um, right. The fact is that *for their audience*, Hezbollah is far more credible – amazingly, DESPITE being a terrorist organization.
Whereas, for any given audience other than RedState/NRO/Weekly Standard, nobody believes anything Bush/Rummy/Cheney says.
This is not to say how amazingly credible Hezbollah are. It’s to say how miserably deceitful the Bush administration has been.
Charles, to deny that Hezbollah has more credibility with a certain (growing) audience, especially among those following the “foreign media and terrorist mouthpieces” you’re worried about, is the kind of refusal to face reality that’s gotten the Bush administration, its supporters, and the rest of us into the current disaster.
Kevin Drum starts swinging back.
Is the consensus of the rightward commenters on this thread truly that reporting-as-stenography is a good thing? Yeesh.
Let me just repeat this line from the WaPo article I cited above:
Let me just repeat this line from the WaPo article Jon (S) cited above.
Charles writes: “Yes, I do, Phil. Ever hear of a thing called free will? So the only recourse to 1953 was to storm sovereign U.S. territory and hold American citizens hostage? So two wrongs make a right? Or is it that we just had it coming, just like the poor girl who showed a little too much leg to the rapist? The Iranians had a choice here.”
Looks more like the US is the serial rapist and you object to anyone fighting back. How dare they! Why, Iran was wearing that short poodle skirt back in 1953, and the US had just pulled into port, and, well, you just don’t tempt a sailor like that. Didn’t her mom ever teach her that?
And yet, Charles, you certainly don’t feel we should resist violent attacks on the flimsiest of grounds. A bit of a double standard there.
“Right. Because it would have been so much better for the greater evil–fresh from its fundamentalist revolution–to overrun Iraq, no?”
If I’m not mistaken, Charlie-o, Iraq started that.
“Is it your position that risking an Iranian takeover of Iraq would’ve made the world a better place?”
If you don’t think that’s the case, why did you support the Bush administration’s war that accomplished exactly that. And entirely predictably.
“Actually, given recent history and diplomatic spats (in which Rumsfeld was involved) I would have guessed that he meant European governments, not Democrats.
Right. During campaign season. OK.”
Well, I’m at least part of the target audience, and that is how I would have interpreted it.
Larv, you appear to be quoting the new AP wording of the story. The section you quote used to be:
It later became:
I fully agree that the revised summary is much more accurate and appropriate.
In unusually explicit terms…
If you want to be hyperpedantic, I suspect that’s completely correct: Rumsfeld was being “unusually explicit”. That’s more a comment on the Administration’s smear-and-deny strategy than anything else, though.
Of course, we’re all appeasers. How many terrorists have you killed today, huh?
Sebastian,
I think the revision went too far in the other direction.
When Runsfeld said “it is apparent that many have still not learned history’s lessons”, then he was clearly thinking of a large number of persons who are critical of the Administration today. As a result, uncritically following it with his aides’ denial “Aides to Rumsfeld said later he was not accusing the administration’s critics of trying to appease the terrorists but was cautioning against a repeat of errors made in earlier eras” is allowing Rumsfeld to make such an accusation against his political opponents to fire up his base, and then claim to not have meant the clear implication of his words when called on it.
“Well, I’m at least part of the target audience, and that is how I would have interpreted it.”
You would have interpreted it as meaning European governments?
Why would he bother? They have no say on the matter. The administration has nothing to fear from Norwegian opinions on the war. Nor has there been any such criticism in the news lately. (There’s a background noise, of course, but there haven’t been any notable instances of some European leader telling Bush to pull out of Iraq.)
Why would he bother bringing up impotent, nonexistent foreign criticism in a speech at an American Legion?
“I fully agree that the revised summary is much more accurate and appropriate.”
If Rumsfeld doesn’t even have the balls to be specific, and hides behind strawmen, how do you expect him to beat the Nazislamostalinist Rouge?
?i>If Rumsfeld doesn’t even have the balls to be specific, and hides behind strawmen, how do you expect him to beat the Nazislamostalinist Rouge?
Amen Jon h!
If Rummy can’t stand up to appeasers how can he stand up to the Islamofacists? What a world!
“You would have interpreted it as meaning European governments?”
Since precision is necessary, I would have interpreted it as European governments, some NGOs, and a limited number of critics at home (of the Sheehan or Cynthia McKinney variety for example but not the Kerry variety).
“If Rumsfeld doesn’t even have the balls to be specific, and hides behind strawmen, how do you expect him to beat the Nazislamostalinist Rouge?”
I hate to repeat it yet again, but I’m not happy with Rumsfeld’s prosecution of the Iraq war.
Since precision is necessary, I would have interpreted it as European governments, some NGOs, and a limited number of critics at home
“a limited number” is not precise.
Argh.
Did you think “of the Sheehan or Cynthia McKinney variety for example but not the Kerry variety” was an accidental brush of the keyboard?
Sebastian,
You are correct, my mistake.
The original version seems to be essentially correct, however. Rumsfeld did portray the administrations critics in such a way. I don’t find your suggestion that he was talking about foreign governments particularly persuasive. In his remarks following the bit about appeasement and negotiating with terrorists, he criticizes the media for it’s coverage of Iraq and the WoT. Notably, he criticizes the American media, rather than the international media, leading to the conclusion that his remarks were directed at Americans and not Europeans. Given the overall context of the speech, it seems entirely reasonable to conclude that when Rumsfeld says “some seem not to have learned history’s lessons,” the “some” he is referring to are also Americans. I suppose you could criticize Burns for calling this “unusually explicit”, but that seems like pretty small beer to me. Rumsfeld may not have been explicit about who he was criticizing, but he was unusually forthright about what he was criticizing them of.
Slarti, Charles, SH –
Who was Rumsfeld talking about? Please name names.
The “it’s not about you” litany is both tiresome and insulting, and until you come up with a plausible counter-example, I think Occam’s Razor applies here. If he’s not talking about adminstration critics, why is he wasting his time talking about such an insubstantial group as the actual terrorist appeasers? Surely he has more pressing matters to attend to – such as, I don’t know, anything.
CB already had no credibility with me, but I really expect a little bit more from Slarti and Holsclaw.
“Since precision is necessary, I would have interpreted it as European governments, some NGOs, and a limited number of critics at home (of the Sheehan or Cynthia McKinney variety for example but not the Kerry variety).”
I’m not sure why these people require a response from the SecDef at a public event in the US, when they’ve all been rather quiet in the media, and the non-US people are pretty much irrelevant.
The war isn’t polling badly because of McKinney and Sheehan and their ilk, it’s polling badly because it’s going badly, there’s no end in sight, and it’s likely to get worse with Bush daily showing off his hard-on to bomb Iran.
The people Rumsfeld is referring to are people who are a threat to his little adventure, like Ned Lamont and Chuck Hagel. There’s no
Pooh,
I think Sebastian has answered it. I don’t find his answer convincing, but that is another issue.
Slarti and Charles have not, to date.
In addition to being astoundingly ignorant to the point of malice on semantic interpretations, CB, you and Q&O are misrepresenting how AP stories work. They’re far more malleable than even a blog post, sometimes getting edited on the wire several times a minute. While the changes are laid out in detail for the editors, it would make the stories unreadable to print that foolscap for the public.
I meant to end that by saying: There’s no point whatsoever in Rumsfeld responding to the impotent and inconsequential, especially if they haven’t said anything for him to respond to.
What *is* worth responding to is the war criticism that has become more of an issue since Lamont one the CT primary.
Which is why that’s the only rational, reasonable conclusion one can draw as to who Rumsfeld was referring to.
Did you think “of the Sheehan or Cynthia McKinney variety for example but not the Kerry variety” was an accidental brush of the keyboard?
a “variety” of person is not specific, either.
Yes, “changed its content without announcing any changes” is not an indication of nefarious intent, but standard procedure for online content, and even for printed newspapers as they go through editions. Are news sites supposed present a complete audit trail for each story, including diffs between the versions?
“Are news sites supposed present a complete audit trail for each story, including diffs between the versions?”
Especially considering that the AP model is historically based on providing a feed for other news outlets which will run the story once, in tomorrow’s paper or a newscast tonight.
In that context, what’s important is the latest version that’s current at the time the newscast airs or the paper’s deadline rolls around.
five hours later, dropped by again.
I see the right-wing’s information war is going quite well. A trio of die-hard liars, spinners, and obfuscators has pinned down a large troop of liberals who could have been using their time better.
The trio has been using its traditional tactics of denying the obvious, feigning ignorance, and making wild accusations.
Against them, the liberals have tried to bring to bear such outmoded weapons as reasoned argument, appeals to conscience and shame, standards of honesty and avoidance of hypocrisy.
Of course, the liberal side is losing, because it falsely believes that it is engaged in an exercise in communication and persuasion based on evidence and inference.
Even more comically, it seems to think it is dealing with people who are acting in good faith. (And liberals pride themselves on attending to evidence! Just look at the evidence of good faith from the right-wing trio!)
Meanwhile, the right-wing side is winning handily, because it realizes that if it can just pin down enough smart liberals on enough ludicrous quibbles for long enough, then it will have achieved its objective for the day and be able to collect the check from Ken Mehlman. (Or the Lincoln Group,or some other third-party cut-out funded by the RNC.)
Meanwhile, Katrina is forgotten.
Corporate profits are up–UBS just declared it is a “golden age of profitability”.
The wages for wage-earners are down.
You could have been discussing those or other productive issues–better, you could have been calling your representatives, or working to vote out some incumbents.
But instead you fell for the right-wing information war, as it is currently waged on blogs around the blogosphere.
Carpeicthus:
“They are far more malleable than even a blog post…”
Thus the use of stone tablets for RNC and Administration information.
Well, as I (and many others) have stated above, I don’t think this is the most reasonable interpretation, but I suppose it’s not impossible. Just out of curiosity, would you be willing to reconsider this interpretion? Say, in light of the cited WaPo article, in which the WH essentially admits that this is in fact their strategy to combat their domestic opponents?
“a “variety” of person is not specific, either.”
Specific enough for the purposes of discussion.
“Orchid” is a variety of flower. There are many types of orchids. One could in theory name every single orchid variety. It is usually easier to say “orchids”. “Rose” is also a variety of flower.
If I am talking about a variety of flowers of the “orchid” type and not the “rose” type, I’m not being ridiculously obscure.
Dishonest commenters who defend Rumsfeld’s unpatriotic lies deserve to be vilified and treated with contempt and should be kicked off this blog, if not spat upon in the streets.
Am I violating the posting policies? (Clearly I’m talking of commenters here only if (a) they’re dishonest and (b) supporting Rumsfeld and (c) Rumsfeld spoke unpatriotic lies). If I can go around saying things like that, because I’m not explicitly identifying any persons here, well… ok, then, but then I don’t think the posting rules mean all that much.
(And to be explicit: I’m not really saying those defending Rumsfeld are dishonest people who should be spat upon; but the argument that he’s referring to some nebulous group we couldn’t even guess at seems spare, at best.
).
Brian: you got that a little wrong. You’re only talking of commenters here if
a) they’re dishonest
b) and Rumsfeld spoke unpatriotic lies
c) which lies they supported
IOW, supporting Rumsfeld’s patriotic lies or unpatriotic truths — or those statements which are neither lies nor truths — is perfectly acceptable.
Remember: parse as narrowly as possible!
Busy again, so I just have time for a general comment.
I laid out an outline of what I thought the Bush administration should be doing on the Information Front. Are they doing it now? No way. They’re speaking with more frequency, yes, but the content of what they’re saying is still the same old bullsh*t. I wrote above that they shouldn’t cheerlead, apply overused rhetoric and get too alarmist. I should add that building strawmen and using bogeymen in their speeches is also counterproductive. I haven’t been terribly thrilled with what Rumsfeld or Cheney or Bush have said in the last week because there’s too much platitude and not enough substance. Quite frankly, except for perhaps Tony Snow, I not optimistic that the inner circle has the ability or the willingness to change their communications strategy, and major changes are needed if we are to prevail on this battlefield.
Well, I’m not sure “falling for the right-wing information war”, is the same as lying.
No, actually, I AM sure they aren’t the same thing.
It may be that Sebastian, Slart, and Charles are wrong about the nature of the “information”, etc., with Charles bringing an extra dollop of enthusiasm to the act of being wrong, but they aren’t lying.
Now Sean Hannity, to throw out a name, isn’t falling for anything either, being a paid, professional liar. The rest of us are amateurs, with no real incentives to lie.
I could go on, but eventually I would begin obfuscating with relish.
I will note that Charles said early in his post that his opposition to Rumsfeld “does not extend to cheap shots.”
I view that as an improvement, which I hope can be extended as well to Murtha, Hillary, Kerry, and the rest of the universe.
Wait, that was a cheap shot. But I’m biased.
Specific enough for the purposes of discussion.
ok. just making sure i don’t read anything into your words that isn’t supposed to be there. in this new Era of Precision, one can’t be too careful. (by “one” i mean “one person”, not one group of people, the Metallica song, or the number “one”; by “Era” i mean an unspecified, but relatively long, timespan, and not the E.R.A., the laundry soap, etc.)
Charles writes: “Quite frankly, except for perhaps Tony Snow, I not optimistic that the inner circle has the ability or the willingness to change their communications strategy, and major changes are needed if we are to prevail on this battlefield.”
Well, you see, that’s the problem. They aren’t interested in *the* battlefield, they’re more concerned about the electoral battlefield.
This is really all about sliming the Dems in a desperate attempt to prevent their being made accountable for their tragic idiocy.
What fed up said.
A trio of die-hard liars, spinners, and obfuscators has pinned down a large troop of liberals who could have been using their time better.
Seriously? Nah. I need to take periodic breaks from my research anyway (:
So after having slowly but methodically caught up with all of the comments here, a brief observation. It seems that the argument, though muddled comes down to this.
Was Rumsfeld being an obscure idiot who comments about “some people” without intending that term to catch any group of people meaningful to the electorate at large or the American Legion, to whom he was addressing himself?
Or was he instead sliming all opposition by misrepresenting their position, a tactic that has become standard GOP practice (especially within the executive branch) and is consistent with his earlier use of all phrases employed in this speech?
I, for one, think the latter is a far more obvious reading, which I intended to play out in my representation of the argument. However, I also feel it is the least offensive to Rumsfeld. Sure, he is a vicious partisan hack, but at least he isn’t a vacuous idiot.
And for what it is worth, I do think that Senator McCain, for example, was included in this broadside. The clear pattern here is that anyone who doesn’t toe the administration line gets blasted, party be damned. Their motives will be impuned, their character called into question, and their intelligence mocked. I really am intrigued as to how one can watch this group in action and think otherwise. I wish someone would explain it to me.
CB: I really would like to see you address Phil’s last round of points.
I know this got dropped upthread, but I don;t have the heart to go an sift through the debate that already occured and I just wanted to ask. If Saddam wasn’t being pushed as an imminent threat, what in the world was all that blather about the mobile chemical labs and the smoking gun being a mushrrom cloud and the enriched uranium from Niger and the rocket tubes that really weren’t?
Lastly, while I think Seb and Slart are quite obviously wrong, and in a way that at times maddeningly frustrating, it bugs me that people think that their own frustration somehow justifies behaving like a bunch of [jerks].
Digby points out, correctly, I think, that the primary purpose of this latest round of steely-eyed speeches is to minimize attention to the Katrina anniversary.
fair point, socratic_me.
John Thullen, I don’t think Slarti, sebastian, Charles are being dishonest here. That was just as far over the posting rules line I felt like going, to demonstrate how that sort of narrow parsing, if accepted, would let one get away with lowering the discourse.
socratic_me- Who specificly is being a jerk? Besides me I mean?
I want to amplify this from fed up’s rant: “A trio of die-hard liars, spinners, and obfuscators has pinned down a large troop of liberals who could have been using their time better” If you aren’t a liar, spinner, and obfuscator you shouldn’t object since no names were named.
I have some sympathy for fed up and ugh’s and Digby’s perspective, but the MSM wasn’t going to stay on Katrina or anything which illustrates the general Republican unfitness to govern for long in any event.
Ernesto has pretty much washed Katrina off the airwaves, at least here in NC.
Frank,
Not sure if the question to me is meant to look like the semihumorous snark above or if it is just an unfortunate coincidence. I actually first thought it was a bit of play, so I will answer as such.
Unlike Mr. Rumsfeld, you don’t have to parse my words carefully.
I don’t have the heart to dig through 200+ comments and pick out names of bad actors, which would in turn just make people angry and start the same behavior towards me. If you don’t see the poor behavior, then feel free to disagree with me. Just realize that I am not referencing the French, but instead people on this thread.
SM- I don’t think being a jerk is a shooting offence, most of us are guilty from time to time, but I’ve been participating in this thread since the begining and I don’t think there are any bad actors here, at least on the liberal side.
Some on the right might be arguing in bad faith, but they may feel they are just playing a game.
In particular I think this thread is close enough to Slarti’s usuall argument that I don’t see how anyone could think any less of him for his participation.
But I’m not promising not to make future use of rhetorical techniques I learn here. I hope I can someday make Republicans I argue with as frustrated as some here have made me.
Frank,
I am sure it seems odd, but it seems to me every bit as odd that you can’t see there has been bad behavior on both sides in this debate. Moreover, because there is a lot of piling on, the left here ends up coming off a lot worse. They are also a lot less effective for it.
One thing I notice a lot here at ObWi is that if someone (on either side) is presented with a very well argued case and a snarky one, they will often slide into debate with the snarky person. I used to think this was because it was easier to slide off into side points and ignore the real issues. The more I read these mega long threads, the more I realize it is probably just that the snarky ones irritate more and therefore provoke quick responses, with the more reasoned thought being put off for later. Since there is an overabundance of nastiness out there, we all get bogged down in the ugly back and forth and the interesting conversation gets squashed.
Now I don’t think being a jerk is a shooting offense, nor even being the word that I replaced with jerk to meet posting rules. But it does irritate me. I have been following this thread from its get-go and just haven’t posted because I work as a teacher and can read between classes but can’t post. I thought about shooting something out really quickly this mornign, but the heat was too high and there wasn’t likely any point. Especially when all I really had to say was that there was so much bad behavior on here that it was really easy to bypass hilzoys excellent and non-vicious comment for all the lower hanging fruit.
socratic_me- I think you might find yourself more at home at tacitus. You keep talking about bad behavior but you are unwilling to point it out, that makes it impossible for us to have an exchange of views. I think you may not have much experience in online discussion if you think skipping the snark could lead to a reasoned discussion. 😉
sm- For example: no matter how little snark, no matter how nicely we ask, Seb, Slart, and Charles are never going to seriously answer questions about who Rumsfeld really was talking about.
Brian Plamer:
Sorry, I was referring to fed up’s comment regarding the trio. I read your comment with the intended irony.
Although now that I reread fed up’s comment, it occurs to me that “trio” could refer to Moe, Larry, and Curly, or maybe Dino, Desi, and Billy, rather than the trio here. Sort of like Rumsfeld’s “some folks” could refer to me, or you, or the Democrat(ic) Party.
It’s hard to tell. Best just to take it personally and ask questions later. 😉
I was talking to Brian Palmer, not Brian “Plamer”, though one could spin that misspelling into heavy irony.
Sorry.
Frank,
Thing is, I have been a longtime regular here at ObWi primarily because it has generally been a forum where lots of worthwile discussion does indeed take place between moderates of all persuasions, among which Slart and Seb are numbered. It has often been heated. It has also been productive. If it is your contention that this is not realizable, then I ask you take that attitude elsewhere where the echo chamber is louder or the screaming more interesting. As it is, I would like to see that enviornment return here and will continue to point out when things are devolving in the hopes it will have some effect.
SM- I’ve been hanging out here for years and I just cannot see how you could have been doing the same and yet think that this thread is anything unusual especially for a birddog thread. Anyway I am having fun and behaving well within posting rules, though your continual vague accusations are starting to seem rude to me.
Or perhaps those wacky Germans behind that obnoxious ‘Da Da Da’ tune have become latter-day administration apologists.
For example: no matter how little snark, no matter how nicely we ask, Seb, Slart, and Charles are never going to seriously answer questions about who Rumsfeld really was talking about.
And given that Seb has clarified exactly who he was talking about in numerous comments above, and even entered discussion as to whether or not this was a reasonable interpretation, this comment is exactly the sort of non-productive and intellectually dishonest snark that I decry.
I also think the CBs last post implies that he thinks there is a difference between throwing a straw man (which Rumsfeld is doing here) and implying your opponents actually hold those views. That seems an odd distinction, but also one that bypasses your question. I mention it separately only because non-benevolent reading is less of an offense in my eyes than outright lies.
Dino, Desi, and Billy
Somebody’s dating himself.
Just sayin’
I’m glad you said it before I did. To be fair, my own ‘Trio’ reference is also a bit musty. Of course, I was only 5 when Da Da Da first hit the charts.
But I knew the chorus word for word.
sm- It sounded like you accused me of lying in your last post, but I know thats impossible because you are infallably civil. I confess I didn’t get what Sebastian was talking about, but I don’t see how anyone could consider Charles’ stab at the problem a serious one.
You read me right and it wasn’t meant to be snarkie or uncivil. Sebastian has answered the question of who he thought Rumsfeld was referring to. To then claim he will never seriously answer that question is, indeed, a lie.
You read me right and it wasn’t meant to be snarkie or uncivil. Sebastian has answered the question of who he thought Rumsfeld was referring to. To then claim he will never seriously answer that question is, indeed, a lie.
Uhm, no. He offered an answer which the commentariat, en masse, deemed so ludicrous as to not qualify is as “serious.”
Combine that with Slarti’s stupifying position that previous usage can’t offer any guidance as to the intended present use, and Charles “loser-defeatists” Bird ‘taking the high-road’ by refraining from “cheap shots” and I consider it edifying that the worst that can be said is that people have been “Jerks” in response to the presto-chango misdirecto that we’ve seen here.
In re: “Fauxtography,” apparently it’s not Charles’s coinage — it’s just the right-wing mem. Frankly, it was too clever by half to be Charles’s; it actually builds on the existing word in a relatively creative way, unlike “democratsunami” and “loser-defeatist.”
sm- Ok fair enough. Not everyone operates by your standard that any time someone says something that doesn’t fully accord with the facts as you know them they are a liar. I’ll remember to call you one if you ever say anything different from the facts as I know them.
“Katherine is not the newspapers, unless I’ve missed something crucial.”
No, I am not. On the other hand I have published on this stuff, though, not just here, and my word ratio is more like 10,000 to 1 than 10 to 1.
I don’t use rhetoric like “gulag of our time”, and I don’t have any association with Amnesty. I do have one with Human Rights Watch. You know, the anti-semitic/self hating Jewish terrorist dupes. They are also known to show a certain lack of appreciation for the best-run detention facility in the history of warfare.
I dated myself for awhile but I found myself to be incompatible and besides I was afraid I would give myself something.
Of course, Larry Fine is dead. As is Dino.
No word on Billy.
I’m extremely immature for my age.
I’d date Shemp, but I think he may be more musty than Trio.
Can pretty much guarantee he’s lost weight since last on screen, which is a plus.
(Wonder if Oprah’s ever tried the ‘Worms Crawl In…’ diet? Can’t be any worse than tapeworms. Apart from the ‘dead and buried’ portion of the weight loss routine, of course.)
In case anyone is still reading down here at comment 250+++…..
It doesn’t matter who it is, exactly, that Rumsfeld claims has “failed to learn the lessons of history”. It doesn’t matter if it’s Katherine, Democrats, the NYT, or the crown heads of Europe.
It doesn’t matter because the *analogy to the 30’s is crap*.
Militant Islam, odious as anyone may find it to be, is not an existential threat to the US, to the West, or to democracy. There is no Islamic state that presents a credible threat to us or to any democratic Western nation. Period.
Disagree? Name one that does.
There are a number of Islamist organizations who would like to kill as many Westerners as they can. That is not the same thing. The appropriate response to them is to find them and capture or kill them.
The “clash of ideologies” line of argument is bullshit, lock stock and barrel. Arguing about who the modern day “Chamberlain” is, is crap, because there is no “modern day Chamberlain”. Noone is seeking to appease terrorists, noone is giving terrorists license to murder people as long they don’t murder us, noone is expecting “peace in our time” with the likes of Al Qaeda. It’s a crock.
Likewise, there is no “modern day Churchill”. Bush is not a visionary prophet of the danger presented by militant Islamism. Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their crew are not the doughty few manning the barricades against the Mohammedan horde. There is nothing in the world today that vaguely resembles the threat presented by fascism in the 1930’s.
Iraq’s excellent adventures extended to their neighbors Iran and Kuwait. They were turned back on both fronts. And, at this point, Iraq is not likely to present a threat to anyone other than themselves for some time.
Pakistan’s hegemonic ambitions extend to Kashmir. Period.
Iran has invaded nobody since the days of Alexander. Saudi Arabia just wants to keep cashing our checks, thank you very much.
Everybody hates Israel, of course, but they have successfully kicked the living sh*t out of anyone that tried to mess with them for the last 60 years. I expect they will continue to do so.
The analogy is crap. That is the point.
Thank you.
“Faux-tography” and its variants have a long, long history — at least as far back as Godard in Week-End.
Compare this from Ilya Somin, at The Volokh Conspiracy, about a month ago:
That is, vague charges are made again “some”, and anyone who objects to being smeared is answered by “Oh, I didn’t mean you…but isn’t it funny that you thought I did?”
Frank,
You have been very involved in these comments. I did not think that it was unfair to assume you had read them. I also made the assumption that, having read this comment by SH, which states
“Since precision is necessary, I would have interpreted it as European governments, some NGOs, and a limited number of critics at home (of the Sheehan or Cynthia McKinney variety for example but not the Kerry variety).”
you would have understood that he had now answered the question you said he would never answer. Moreover, it was quoted, in part or as a whole in several comments downthread, at least two of which note that it is a plausible but unconvincing interpretation, I assumed it would be rather hard to miss for someone so involved in the thread.
If, in fact, you missed every one of those comments, I must apologize for accusing you of lying. Instead, I will simply ask that you read the comments more closely before accusing someone of obfuscating by asserting that they are “never going to seriously answer questions about who Rumsfeld really was talking about.”
Now, if that is the standard you wish to hold me to, then I will thank you for pointing out my inconsistencies on this matter. Indeed, I will likely thank you for your assistance.
Pooh, the commentariate did not, en masse, decide anything of the sort. Follow my links above to see two examples of the commentariate deciding precisley otherwise. In fact, as I looked for actual quotes of the post, I was surprised that they were often attempts by others to point out that he had answered this question, and seriously.
Moreover, I must wonder what the point of commenting here is at all if you are willing to take his answer, which he supported at length in further comments, and declare it unserious because you think it is wrong. I think it is wrong, as well. Even profoundly misguided. But given his support for that position, I really am puzzled as to what it would take to convince you it was a serious response.
What I’m curious is if all these folks who have searched their souls and realized that Rummy is not the man for the job will support this.
Socratic me, the civil way to make a point about civility in a thread is to make your point ONCE and then drop it.
OT: So much for that Libertarian-Democratic Party alliance Hil and others were musing over a while back.
“I find his “libertarian, trusting, free-people approach”, his “Common Sense Jeffersonian Conservative Principles” and his Reaganesque belief in libertarian ideals very attractive.”
What a crock of macaca.
Lj–whoa. Who spiked the Democratic leadership’s gatorade?
Tangentially to the main point of this thread–I just happened upon these quotations from Ahmadinejad:
This is of course ripe for people to say: see, Human Rights Watch and the ACLU and American liberals sound just like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. They’re on his side. But Western liberals didn’t get this rhetoric from him–he stole it from them.
You didn’t catch Khomeini or Zarqawi talking this way. And you never used to catch Bin Laden doing it, but then there was that weird tape referencing “My Pet Goat.”
Why’s he doing this earnest believer in human rights, freedom, and nonviolence shtick?
He can’t possibly believe it, right? I mean, I talk about Bush’s capacity for self-deception, how he reconciled “compassionate conservatism” with the Texas death penalty system and “Americas values and interests are now one” with his torture policies. But for Ahmadinejad to actually believe his rhetoric would require a completely different level of this skill. I mean, a regime that sends this guy to the UN Human Rights Council does not mean the pretty speeches about human dignity even at the shallow level Bush means them. To say nothing of the holocaust denial, and–I really don’t think I need to keep listing examples.
So who’s the target audience? U.S. liberals? Europe? People watching on Al Jazeera? Iranians themselves?
Or am I making too much of this–is it that he just wants to rhetorically attack the U.S. so he’s picking up the nearest convenient arguments lying around?
I think this is related to the fact that Ahmadinejad has to develop a power base outside of the mullahs, and the overall mood in Iran has been an overwhemlingly strong desire to open negotiations with the US, if I recall the public opinion polls. The target audience is educated middle class Iranians, I think
This also gets back to the question of how other nations view the US and the WaPo has this very interesting op-ed related to that on what the writer says is another angle.
Gosh, what I missed while I was on the plane, and then trying to get my fire alarm to shut the hell up, and then asleep.
First, there have been some violations of the posting rules, of which the most recent is: ” A trio of die-hard liars”, and an earlier one is the reference, which I somehow can’t find, to the conservatives here as possibly being paid shills. The first is from fed up; the paid shills comment, alas, I don’t feel all that inclined to go hunting for. In any case, stop it.
Second, though this point has been made before, I found this question by Charles incredible:
(At least, I find it incredible if I am allowed to take it as a rhetorical question whose answer is supposed to be: no, the actions of the Islamists are much worse.)
It’s not just arming Saddam during the Iran/Iraq war. (Though here I want to add two things: first, that we didn’t just arm Saddam; we also gave him satellite data on Iranian military positions. Focussing on arms alone understates our support of him during that time.
Second, the fact that other people did too is irrelevant. The comparison you made was between what we did to Iran and what Islamists did to us. The fact that other people also armed Saddam during the Iran/Iraq war is no more relevant than the fact that people other than Islamists also killed Americans.
But the fact that we gave significant military assistance to Iran’s enemies during wartime, even though we knew at the time that they were using chemical weapons, is not, to my mind, the main thing. The main thing is that we helped overthrow their democratically elected President in 1953, giving power instead to the Shah. Supporting the overthrow of a democratically elected government is much, much worse than anything the Islamists have done, or could do, to us. Moreover, in installing the Shah, we gave power to a monarch whose secret police killed and tortured tens of thousands of Iranians.
Americans may not remember this history, but Iranians do — as we would if Iran had installed, say, Louis Farrakhan as dictator of the US, and then supported and trained his brutal secret police as they imprisoned and killed thousands of Americans, and deprived us of basic political and civil liberties. It is impossible to understand the situation in Iran without understanding this.
Even if you take only the deaths, what we did to Iran is worse than what “the Islamists” have done to us. Adding in the participation in the coup against a democratically elected government, however, moves it to a completely different level.
I should add that that action was also supported by people who combined an alarmist view of what Mossadegh might do with a complete failure to imagine the long-term consequences of our intervention, consequences that include the Iranian revolution, and that are still being worked out to this day.
It’s easy, now, to say that of course we should have left Mossadegh in power, and allowed the Iranians to develop their own tradition of democracy. The world would be a vastly better place. At the time, however, that would have been regarded as appeasement. That is also worth remembering.
Matttbastard, there are plenty of libertarians other than Jon Henke, many of whom would find Jim Webb much more to their liking than George Allen. It’s true that there are a lot of people who call themselves libertarians but really don’t care about any issues besides tax cuts (not that Henke fits into that category).
Holy mackerel. I mean wow! Read the whole thing. All the way down to the end.
The on topic part of the link is that Dan Senor isn’t clear who Rummy is talking about either. First he says:
So, uh, any advocate of withdrawal, ever, from any engagement, for any reason? Or is he saying that only strict pacifists who advocate withdrawal from all those military engagements qualify? Are there a couple of hundred million morally confused people in the US or a few hundred thousand? Then he says:
Uh-huh. Many activists. Then the ubiquitous bogeyman of MoveOn. Then we’re back to people who advocate withdrawal, or even “scaling back our resources in places.” Then it’s not “places,” but Iraq.
Take a good look, Sebastian. That man is your comrade. Your argument is forensically superior, and your moral authority is (IMO) greater than his, but you are on the same “side of history.”
You think it’s important to dissent from the obvious, and defend that dissent? (European leadership, eh? Yeah right, whatever.) Good idea. That’s how science marches on. But keep in mind that when diplomacy fails and the shooting starts you will jump into the nearest foxhole and not the one further away, because that’s what people do. And next to you will either be people like Dan Senor or people like Paul Hackett. Charles Johnson or Katherine. Someone who hewed to the administration or someone who shunned it.
KCinDC: Colour me still skeptical. I think social security and health care will continue to form an ideological chasm that most libertarians will refuse to cross. But we’ll see. Such issues are less likely to play in the VA Senate Race, aso my concerns are likely negligible, apart from blogosphere insider baseball.
Back on topic: op-ed LA Times op-ed from Rummy. Pretty much a word for word repetition of his Legion speech. No further clarification re: appeasers of fascism is offered, although he does expand on his theory of Guantanamo being the greatest detention centre EVAR!!11
“The facility at Guantanamo Bay…includes a volleyball court, basketball court, soccer field and library (the book most requested is “Harry Potter”). The food, served in accordance with Islamic diets, costs more per detainee than the average U.S. military ration.”
F*ck Disney World; next family vacation we’re taking the kids to sunny Guantanamo!
As always, hilzoy says what I was trying to say, only one-one thousandth as belligerently and ten thousand times as eloquently. Thank you, hilzoy.
KCinDC and mattbastard, I’m one Virginia libertarian who will be voting for Jim Webb. I’ve even donated to his campaign.
Matttbastard, there are all sorts of people who call themselves libertarians. I’d have thought torture, oversightless spying, and indefinite detention of citizens without charges would have been a pretty big ideological chasm, but a substantial segment of the “libertarian” population managed to jump it.
That’s not to say that I don’t have my doubts about Kos’s idea of a libertarian-Democratic alliance as well.
Radish, I’m not sure Hackett does our side any favors with the Nazi analogies. Saying things like “Herr Senor” and “little Unterfuehrer of Propaganda” isn’t going to persuade anyone who doesn’t already agree with him. It just gives people a convenient excuse for dismissing everything he has to say.
Phil: thanks.
About libertarians: I was actually interested less in proposing an alliance than in figuring out the real dispute. I mean: it’s striking how easy it is to describe me in terms that would lead someone to think I’m a libertarian. My main motivation, in choosing policies, is to figure out which one would do the most to maximize freedom. This is because I think that everyone should have the ability to figure out for him/herself what to do with his or her life, and that if it’s possible to remove constraints on that freedom, we should. I do not believe that happiness matters more than freedom, that everyone should be made uniform, etc., etc. I could go on with further similarities, but it would just be boring.
But lo! I suspect that most libertarians and I don’t just differ about domestic policy; we are worlds apart. Why is this? I wanted to know.
Additionally, I think that while a lot of libertarians have probably considered the real deep-down differences between themselves and me/people like me, some might not have, and for them, articulating those differences could make liberalism seem like a much more interesting alternative than, say, Ayn Rand makes it seem.
I don’t expect all, or many, libertarians to come rushing over to join me. At most, I think some might just be disgusted with the Republicans and sort of sidle over while holding their noses. But clarifying the issues seemed to me to be worth doing anyways, especially since it might help them see how someone could hold roughly my views on social policy not because of a desire to homogenize the world or aggrandize state power, but out of concern for human freedom, given a slightly different, but I hope not wildly implausible, take on freedom than theirs. Which would let them stop holding their noses quite so hard.
Ah, but “anyone who doesn’t already agree with him” about what exactly? I submit to you that “agreement” in the normal sense of the word wasn’t even on the menu. That was FOX news, not ObWi. It wasn’t a rational discussion of policy, and it wasn’t an opportunity to accumulate intellectual credibility. That was about tribal identity. A pure-dee pissing contest. A one-round verbal boxing match intended for half-attentive channel-surfers. From that point of view Hackett handed Senor his backside very handily and memorably.
Anyway I’m nowhere near partisan enough to worry about whether Hackett is doing Democrats per se any favors, but even if I were I don’t think inflammatory rhetoric necessarily undermines message discipline. If you want Martin to do his thing you gotta let Malcolm and Huey do theirs. JM2c.
Addendum: in case it’s not clear, that tribal subtext is why I framed it the way I did with respect to Sebastian. I think it’s silly to pretend that the US is not a house divided against itself, and I think it’s silly to pretend that the ObWi bubble of [somewhat] rational discourse is normal.
Most Americans aren’t paying attention at all. For most of them it’s just so much boxing. But
ifwhenif the shooting starts, the closest foxhole is the one you wind up in, and for that reason I advise people to think now about which foxhole they are closest to.hilzoy, after lengthy reflection over the past several years, I’ve decided that libertarianism makes the most sense — at least to me — if one takes the position that freedom (which is supposed to be the goal of libertarians) works best when it manifests itself primarily as social and political freedom, not just (or not even) as economic freedom. Which is why I think universal health care, for example, is more important than tax cuts.
Phil: do you think your interpretation of libertarianism is one that is representative of most self-identified libertarians in the US? (Note: this is not meant as snark, but as a sincere inquiry.)
Phil, I heard Geoffrey Nunberg speak a few weeks ago, and one of the points he made was that the phrase “economic freedom” usually has a different meaning in political discussions from what it has in normal conversation, where people use it to mean the freedom that not having to worry about money gives you to take risks without facing homelessness, to make changes, and to enjoy life. Universal health care increases that kind of economic freedom.
matt, not even a little. I think the people most commonly referred to as “libertarians” would have me stoned to death. But I know I’m not alone; a lot of commenters at the Reason blog feel the same, and Matt Welch — Reason contributor and LA Times pundit — veers close to that sentiment as well, sometimes.
Phil: Thanks for the honest response. Another quick question – do you think the Democratic Party is doing enough to entice libertarians like yourself and those whom you’ve described, and if not, what could be done to attract them without sacrificing key Democratic principles?
(I’m going to try to get my friend Megan to post some comments here (if this thread doesn’t get banished down the memory hole before I reach her). She is an active member of the Libertarian Party in Colorado, and would find this discussion fascinating.
From what I’ve observed, most blogosphere discussions involving the subject of libertarianism seem to focus mainly on those self-described ‘libertarians’ who regularly vote Republican, as opposed to third-party stalwarts like her.)
Matttbastard, I think that’s because those self-described libertarians are a lot more numerous than the big-L Libertarians. One of my college friends is a Libertarian (has even run for Congress a couple of times, and once got more votes than the difference between the Republican and Democratic candidates), and from discussions with him it seems unlikely that many Libertarians will ever vote for Republicans or Democrats.
The discussions I’ve seen in various places have been about whether the Democrats can reach out to libertarians, not Libertarians. Maybe Sebastian can suggest a new name we can use for the party to avoid confusion (and annoy the members, purely unintentionally, of course).
matttbastard: if this thread has vanished, just email me and I’ll create a new one. I’d be fascinated as well.
Phil: I tend to think of freedom (the sort at issue in this debate, at least; not e.g. freedom of the will) as the ability to live the sort of life you want to live, unless you yourself screw up. (This is, needless to say, a rough definition, but I’m still jetlagged, and so won’t attempt philosophical precision unless someone begs me to.)
Thus, having health insurance massively increases my freedom, not only because I get to be cured of my diseases if they are curable, but also because I don’t have to worry about the possibility that I might get sick, save up for the possibility that I might be unlucky enough to get something whose treatment costs are well into six figures, etc. The loss to my freedom involved in having to pay for it is much smaller.
Somewhat more interestingly, I think that food safety programs and other forms of regulation are probably a considerable net gain for freedom. If I had to choose between (a) risking getting poisoned by my food, and (b) testing it all myself, both options entail real losses (in the second case because of all that time spent testing.) Giving me a third option — (c) have food inspectors, and serious penalties for violations — lets me get on with my life without having to risk food poisoning or spending my life with little bits of food and a chemistry set. I think that when you add up the gains to everyone from this, they outweigh the losses from taxes and regulation. Though of course it also follows from my view that the regulations should be well constructed — as a freedom-loving liberal, I think regulations that cannot be so justified are bad bad bad.
KC, re: nazi references
You have a point, but I think it gives a measure of the true level of the anger that Hackett must feel. I get peeved when I’m called an appeaser, but for Hackett (who his Republican opponent tried to suggest was in some safe comfy billet previously), the anger must be in the stratosphere.
And I realize this is elitist snark, but looking at the Fox page, the linking of the words to dictionary.com (and how much you want to bet that they carefully choose which words to link) suggests something, doesn’t it?
Thanks Hil;-)
KCinDC – yeah, I’m aware of the distinction, and in retrospect haven’t made my intentions clear. I guess (as a Canadian) I’m trying to understand whether the ‘softer’ libertarian (small ‘l’;-)) constituency outlined by Phil typically vote Republican or Democrat. Is the current policy platform of the Democratic Party repelling or attracting these voters, especially in consideration of the Bush admin’s style of ‘big government’ conservatism?
I just looked up “libertarian” on Wikipedia, but the entry had been recently vandalized, so I didn’t get very far. Probably some anarchist mischief. There’s some sort of irony in all of that but why trouble ourselves?
I find the vacillation of Libertarians between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party to be confusing.
Generally speaking, I think what it boils down to is if a Libertarian is interrupted while having sex by an uptight religious person, he or she decides to vote Democratic in the next election. If he or she is taxed for having sex, then they vote for the Republican candidate in the next election.
All this while dining on raw squirrel and exhibiting high crankiness at local zoning commission meetings.
Hey, I’m kidding.
I will say that I agree with Hilzoy and Phil pretty much, but I’d like to note that someone who believes universal healthcare is the way to go may be many things, but libertarian ain’t one of them. You would be whatever I am, which is not libertarian. I’m an appeaser to universal healthcare, but that’s another thread.
I suggest, too, that to satisfy both the regulation haters and the safe food lovers that DaveC. henceforth serve as our Nation’s official taster. No? See, that’s why we have bureaucracy.
I would also note that I don’t like having my bedroom activities interrupted, unless it’s to collect taxes. But make it quick and shut the door when you leave.
Hilzoy, one way of describing the difference is to say that (generalizations abound here) libertarians deny the existence of positive rights. Many will claim that the very concept is self-negating, on grounds something like this:
A right is a claim so strong that you can legitimately pursue it with all force necessary. Not that this is license for Bush’s gulag petit, but (for instance) you may with moral right kill someone trying to kill you, and you can bring lethal force to bear in the defense of another.
In addition, a right is a claim upon others, that may be satisfied fully by their refraining from evil deeds. There are no intrinsically unfulfillable rights, in this general libertarian framework; it would be nonsense for us to have a moral duty we can’t fulfill. Hence, for instance, the libertarian version of the right to life is basically “don’t kill me”, with some qualifications to cover practical issues like conspiracy and reckless disregard.
This is where the libertarian hostility to taxes and social services comes in. It’s not really negotiable. The idea of a claim by right on the help of others is logically inconsistent – it’s open-ended, and the cut-off point we set for “this is enough” will always be arbitrary rather than (as with not being murdered) obvious and intrinsic. It will always come down to you using the lethal power of the state to grab an arbitrary amount of my stuff to satisfy your personal impulses.
I’m not sure that there is any real refutation to this; one would have to start by disassembling the premises. The practical improvement seems to me the insight Phil has reached, about the realities of social as well as economic freedom.
There was something I read recently that argued that libertarianism must return to its core principle, which was drug legalization (I’m being facetious, but the blog post wasn’t) Does that ring any bells (about the blog post, not about drug legalization)
Is there going to be a response from CB to the last round of Phil/Hilzoy criticisms?
Hilzoy: so you know what I’m going to say, right? When does freedom maximization get too onerous for some particular minority, such that it’s a violation of their (natural, political,etc.) rights? For example, what if universal health care came at the expense of severely limiting the kinds of wages doctors can earn for their services? I would think that freedom loving liberals and libertarians disagree about that threshold.
Hilzoy: Second, though this point has been made before, I found this question by Charles incredible:
“Do you think our actions against Iran are on the same moral plane as Islamists’ actions against the U.S.?”
(At least, I find it incredible if I am allowed to take it as a rhetorical question whose answer is supposed to be: no, the actions of the Islamists are much worse.)
Uh, Hilzoy, you missed the whole point of this thread. You are NOT allowed to take any rhetorical device at its obvious value – to do so will expose you, right here on this board, to endlessly repeated charges of distortion, if not outright lying. Language doesn’t mean what it means when rightwingers, intellectually corrupt and morally obtuse, are trying to weasel out of it.*
(*Obviously, this remark need not apply to any regular contributor to this thread, unless s/he is willing to admit s/he is intellectually corrupt and morally obtuse, in which case it does.)
Otherwise, fine comment.
You are NOT allowed to take any rhetorical device at its obvious value
In fairness to Charles, he recognizes that it was a rhetorical device, as is illustrated by what Chas wrote at TiO, which is along the lines of his 12:40, but more to the point, I think. I paste it below
Rumsfeld directed specific comments to mainstream media editors and Irene Khan at AI (that “gal”), and he directed more generalized comments to “folks” and “some quarters” who would appease terrorists, have moral confusion, etc. The general comments were strawman bullsh*t, and I said so in the comment thread. Rumsfeld may very well have intended to mean all Democrats and all liberals and all war critics. I don’t know. The problem is that Burns was either too lazy or too biased (or both) to confirm whatever intentions Rumsfeld may have had. Instead, Burns deceptively crossed the line from reporting to editorializing. He would’ve provided a valuable public service had he pressed the issue, asking Rumsfeld or his staff exactly to whom he was referring.
Thus, the problem is not Rumsfeld using such devices, but the press not pressing when they should, which I can actually agree with to some extent. However, if no one does press Rummy (and I’m not sure if the opportunities present themselves readily to do so), I think we can take the meaning hanging out there, while Chas might think not. However, as Chas said, this post was written for Redstate and one could imagine how it would be taken if Rummy were accused of writing ‘strawman bs’.
Bruce: one way of responding to that argument is to say: I am not arguing on the basis of rights. I think that the question what I have a right to has several possible interpretations. (1) What do I have a right to under a given system? (E.g., under the rules of baseball, if you pitch me four balls, I have a right to go to first.) (2) What do I have a right to under any minimally acceptable system of laws? (Possibly: not to be killed without having been convicted of a crime, and things like that.) (3) What do I have a right to under the best system? (If that system gives me a right to health insurance, then, well, it does.) (4) What do I have a right to absent any system of laws at all (in the ‘state of nature’?) Etc.
In all cases, though, you have to say something about the background system you’re assuming (where this includes the possibility of saying: there is no such system.) Then we need to ask: what sort of system of laws should we have? It’s not clear to me at all that this is best thought of as the question: which system would grant me all my rights. The best system will presumably not violate any of the rights that no minimally acceptable system would violate, and would give me the rights that the best system would give me. (Tautologically.) But it’s not as though there are enough antecedent rights to allow us to determine the best system using rights alone.
Here it helps that I do not accept a right to any specific system of property, though I do accept a right to some such system. (Where some systems include liability to taxation and other restrictions, so long as those are not sufficiently extensive to make it pointless to talk about a person having property at all.)
Dispatch from the information war.
Generally speaking, I think what it boils down to is if a Libertarian is interrupted while having sex by an uptight religious person, he or she decides to vote Democratic in the next election. If he or she is taxed for having sex, then they vote for the Republican candidate in the next election.
John, this is probably the truest thing said about the way libertarians act in relation to the two big parties!
matt, the speaking personally, I tend to vote Democrat anyway in elections that matter, for a number of reasons:
— the only person who expressed any political opinions in my household growing up was my father, who — being a Vietnam veteran — held no brief for Republicans.
— My grandparents on both sides were pretty much New Deal fans
— In my adult life, the Republican party has always been too closely associated with the religious right at the state level and above for me to feel comfortable giving them any power over people’s lives.
That said, I don’t think the Democratic Party is doing a good job of appealing to small-l libertarians because the dialogue is taking place at different levels of abstraction.
On the Democratic side, the arguments being offered are that, on balance, a vote for the Democrats means a net increase in freedom. Not that it’s reduced to that capsule statement, but that’s the thrust of it.
On the libertarian side, they’ve been conditioned by decades of Rand, Mises and “The Road to Serfdom” that it all comes down to one thing: Who Will Take Less Of My Money And Property In Taxes? That’s it. Grover Norquist helped the Republicans win that battle, thus I’d say 99% of libertarians are going to go R. (Plus, the libertarians generally think the Democrats were on the wrong side in Kelo, and that’s a Roe moment for them.)
What needs to happen is that the Democrats have to find a way of saying that:
1. Rand, Hayek and Mises aside, and taking as given that we don’t want confiscatory taxation or punishing success, there are more measures of freedom than marginal tax rates.
2. Taxes are a given in a democratic nation, and would you rather they be used to help sick people and build better roads, or to ban nipples on television and blow up the Middle East?
3. Taxes aside, the Republicans in the last six years have done more to make this nation and its people less free than even the most leftist Democratic president possible could do.
Dispatch from the information war.
Obviously just another appeaser that should be arrested.
I’ve never understood how property rights (which are the core of most libertarians’ beliefs) can be viewed as purely negative rights. The concept of property doesn’t exist outside of a system that can determine who owns a particular piece of property and enforce the owner’s rights to it, and that seems like a positive right to me.
Hilzoy: You may not be speaking the language of rights, but your libertarian critic will be, starting with “It doesn’t matter if this is a socially useful program, you have no right to do it through coercive means.” (Um, in case it’s not clear, I’m trying to answer the question, “Why can’t well-intentioned liberals and well-intentioned libertarians with a shared hostility to Leviathan Jr. and a shared interest in a society that is peaceful and prosperous get along better?” I’m not attempting to defend the libertarian argument so much as to zero in on just where the crucial stumbling blocks are likely to be.)
KC: Most libertarias have a basically Lockean view of property, and a usually insufficiently examined view that in the state of nature, each could defend their own or simple mutual defense could defend several.
By the way, something that doesn’t actually follow from libertarian principles is nonetheless taken as a given by many libertarians: a disbelief that changing the scale of an issue affects any of the basic moral considerations. That is, there is no situation involving a million people, or a billion, that is fundamentally different in terms of rights and responsibilities from a situation involving two. This coexists, usually without a moment’s examination, with a common fascination with emergent properties as something to take very seriously in the merits of the division of labor and such.
Bush chimes in on the information war: how is this even convincing to anyone anymore? I would think that in most people’s minds the policy itself is what led us to the risk of Iraq being turned over to the terrorists, so the blame would fall on Bush himself for making the world a more dangerous place. Maybe everyone for whom this is convincing already believes that Iraq was run by the terrorists?
Elba, the Washington Times has an interesting contribution to the information war today with the headline “Pentagon sees no civil war in Iraq”.
This is possibly boiling Libertarianism down too much, but my impression is that Libertarians – particularly the Randian variety – define liberty and rights from a strictly personal perspective: my rights, my property, my person.
This is how some Libertarians can say that serving on a jury without pay is “involuntary servitude”, thus equating it with slavery. The idea that jury service is necessary to a societal concept of justice is irrelevant – just as the idea that taxes are necessary to sustain societal concepts of shared infrastructure, equity, etc. are irrelevant – because Libertarians don’t accept the concept of societal anything.
Libertarians do make use of what the concept of taxes as societal mutual responsibility has created – e.g., roads, schools, standardized medical care, regulatory-compliant consumer goods – while railing against the concept that enabled those things to be created.
Which, to my mind, is kind of like the living polyps which comprise the topmost layer of a coral reef believing that the mass of the reef itself was a happy accident that had nothing to do with collective action, in order to disbelieve in collective action at all.
“Is there going to be a response from CB to the last round of Phil/Hilzoy criticisms?”
I was hoping for that too. I think (but am not sure) it was Jeanne Kirkpatrick who first trotted out the whole “moral equivalence” ploy–that is, whenever a critic points out that America or one of its allies has committed some atrocity, the America-defender says in shocked tones “Surely you aren’t equating our actions with theirs?” It’s supposed to be rhetorical checkmate at that point, and if the America-critic doesn’t back down in a hurry (“Oh, no, of course not–we’re God’s gift to creation and our enemies are Satan’s reply”), that just shows he or she is a moonbat who doesn’t have to be taken seriously.
It’d be interesting to see Charles admit that up to this point, Iran has been more sinned against than sinning in relationship to the US. Which is not to say we should therefore feel so guilty that we have to accept Iranian development of nuclear weapons in penance.
BTW, since this is CB’s thread, I tend to agree with LJ above that CB made a good point over in the “Taking it Outside” blogsite. It’d have been better if reporters had hounded Rumsfeld on the spot to say who he meant.
I think the difference between me and a lot of other libertarians is that they came to the philosophy through books like Atlas Shrugged and Human Action, and I came to it through Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in a Free Society.”
By the way, something that doesn’t actually follow from libertarian principles is nonetheless taken as a given by many libertarians: a disbelief that changing the scale of an issue affects any of the basic moral considerations. That is, there is no situation involving a million people, or a billion, that is fundamentally different in terms of rights and responsibilities from a situation involving two.
Bingo. It’s a tough one to tackle when trying to cross that bridge from the major parties.
italics off
On Iran, Ara asked this question: “Ask yourself to compare the severity of the impact of American actions against Iran compared to the severity of the actions of militant Islam — whomever you want to include in that — against the US.”
Phil and Hil chimed in, and I’ll try to answer.
First off, in the early years the Iranians fought Iraq using weapons that were almost entirely from the United States. The use of American weapons by the Iranians saved Iranian lives (cite). In later years, the U.S. provided weaponry to Iran, but ended the practice in 1986 when the Iran-Contra scandal blew wide open.
Second, the U.S. played a role in the Iran-Iraq War but it was a small one. The USSR, France, China, Brazil and Epypt were much more involved in providing weaponry to Iraq. I would hope that Hil and Phil would agree that the severity of the impact of Soviet, French, Chinese, Brazilian and Egyptian actions against Iran was more severe than what the U.S. wrought in that war.
The U.S. had a two-track policy with Iran, establishing a covert program to undermine the mullahs and another intending to establish ties (cite):
Neither track proved particularly workable, but the point is that Iraq didn’t get sole support from the U.S.
In 1982, when it looked like Iran was getting the upper hand, the U.S. decided to weaken Iran’s chances. Khomeini had the choice to stop right there, but he pressed on. Had he stopped, the lives and money saved would’ve been enormous. The U.S. made the choice to go with what it thought was the lesser evil, preferring to prolong the fight rather than have Iran–not long from its fundamentalist revolution–take over a neighboring country rich in oil reserves. Shalom:
I agree that assistance from the CIA to allegedly calibrate chemical weapons was a pretty evil thing to do. I also agree that we provided the Iraqis intelligence and some financial support. We also gave the Iranians intelligence (some of it bogus, some of it legit).
I also agree that the U.S. was wrong to help engineer a coup which brought the Shah to power. What we don’t know is if a Mossadeq regime (and subsequnt administrations) would have been any better, given the dictatorial tendencies he displayed.
To summarize, in re-thinking about it, I don’t have a good answer to Ara’s question, but part of the reason is that I don’t think it’s a fair question. Yes, bad things happened in Iran and the U.S. played a role, but those events pertain to one country, Iran. The WAMI is a war in progress and it isn’t just a war against the U.S., but against western civilization and moderate Muslims. We don’t yet know how the severity of actions will play out and against whom.
It seems Charles believes that Westerners have a magical reset button for time/history.
(But it only works for Westerners!)
“Do-Over” “Do-Over”
I’m sure when Middle Easterners are being bombed, slaughtered and killed by our weapons; they are comforted by the goodness in your honorable heart.
I would hope that Hil and Phil would agree that the severity of the impact of Soviet, French, Chinese, Brazilian and Egyptian actions against Iran was more severe than what the U.S. wrought in that war.
Once again, this is neither relevant nor the question at hand. It’s the tactic of a five-year-old: “But . . . but . . . he did a lot worse than I did!” It has no bearing whatsoever on our actions vis-a-vis Iran.
Yes, bad things happened in Iran and the U.S. played a role, but those events pertain to one country, Iran.
“Bad things?” A million people here, a million there, soon you’re talking real casualties, am I right?
The WAMI is a war in progress and it isn’t just a war against the U.S., but against western civilization and moderate Muslims.
Can you do me a favor, and list the entire group of Western nations who have suffered attacks in their own territory, or in their foreign embassies, or who are at serious risk of attack, in this war? This is a serious question, btw.
We don’t yet know how the severity of actions will play out and against whom.
Oh, I think we can make some educated guesses.
In re the bigger picture, does the disastrous outcome — for Iranians, Iraqis and the US — of the Iran-Iraq War provide sort of a clue as to why people are skeptical that the many of the same group of people who effed that up should never have been allowed to pull something like the current Iraq war, nor any future wars, anywhere, ever? And how people in the Middle East might have their own preferred outcomes that have nothing to do with what sort of political system we wish them to adopt?
Charles: “What we don’t know is if a Mossadeq regime (and subsequnt administrations) would have been any better, given the dictatorial tendencies he displayed.”
Well, the Shah was an actual dictator, who deployed a ruthless secret police, which we trained, against his people. It’s hard for me to see Mossadegh’s alleged tendencies as an argument that he would have been no better. It would have taken a lot to be worse.
“It’s hard for me to see Mossadegh’s alleged tendencies as an argument that he would have been no better. It would have taken a lot to be worse.”
And he, to ply the whip on poor dead Dobbin yet again, was democratically elected. Charles’s post-hoc dismissal of an inconvenient fact seems like sophistry to me. We do believe in democracy, don’t we?
hilzoy: but he could have been the equal of six Mega-Hitlers! Would you want to be responsible for that?
[Also, to the owners/administrators of the blog-formerly-known-as-HoCB: I can’t seem to register for wordpress to leave comments. Any tips?]
Anarch: He could have been a pair of ragged claws/ Scuttling across the floors of silent seas…
Just saying.
A bit of a pile on here, but let me note that the answer Charles makes concentrates on the facts and doesn’t contain any sniping at anyone.
Having said that, one of the problems with balance of power kind of strategies is that they allow certain people (like weapons manufacturers) to profit by maintaining the conflict. I would suggest that the ‘two-track’ approach that Charles suggests is not some sort of Solomonic notion of fairness, but a schizophrenic approach induced by the fact that Iran had a huge stockpile of US arms from when they were a client state, and the profit opportunity was what drove some of this. It’s hard for me to see this as being a thought out strategy and remember that after this, Reagan’s advisors were replaced by ‘adults’ who would clean up the mess. I would argue that WAMI represents the same kind of non-thought out strategy that consists of propping up regimes yet allowing decentralized terrorist groups to emerge. But I do appreciate Charles answer and the measured tone.
Anarch, I’m checking it our right now
“I would argue that WAMI represents the same kind of non-thought out strategy that consists of propping up regimes yet allowing decentralized terrorist groups to emerge.”
Wouldn’t that make it a double WAMI?
Sorry. No, really. I am a bad, bad person and am going back to lurking now.
You want inaccurate AP coverage of Rumsfeld? Try this. “Reaches out to Democrats”?! Michael Froomkin expresses his objections
This is way late to the party but I thought I’d throw some raw meat on the table.
If U.S. policies towards Iraq and Iran have resulted in massive arms sales to both of them, is this pure coincidence ?
If Rummy says you can’t appease extremists, is he speaking from personal knowledge of the crew at Pennysylvania Avenue ?
Musing real hard on thoughts like these.
hilzoy: I grow old… I grow old… I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
CB: I am with the others who say that it is unlikely that Mossadeq would have been worse. But more to the point: what’s the relevance of that? If some country deposed George Bush by means of a military coup, I would think that it is utterly morally irrelevant whether they would have installed someone better. It simply counts as no defense of such an action. A person can’t point to an act of treachery and justify it because of its good consequences. I just think this is a basic moral point.
Look: I really dislike this President. I think he’s the worst of the modern era. But under no circumstances do I think that any other country would have the prerogative to depose him, and even if they were to replace him with the second coming of (insert the name of your favorite President here), I think that ameliorates their treachery not at all. And we would have justification for a war against any country that tried to depose our President.
Well, Thomas Kean thinks Rummy crossed a line.
Excellent point, Ara.
And I’ll come back to mine: Who here is volunteering to have themselves and their loved ones killed for the sake of a stranger’s vision of a better America? Preferably strangers who come from quite different cultures and seem not to know a bunch of things we think important about our history and culture. I’ve decided that I will henceforth grant the power to inflict massive damage on other people’s cultures for the sake of reengineering them only to people who can show me they’re serious about the principle with some sacrifice of their own.
Alternatively, I will grant them the privilege without requiring the sacrifice if they can produce a working truthometer or rectitudoscope, some device capable of measuring the objective rightness of a person or cause that can be built with off-the-shelf components and delivers the same answers for everyone. I’m denying the privilege only to people who claim that it’s okay because they’re right (even if I share some of their beliefs), because everyone’s making that claim and can’t all actually be right. Objective demonstration via measure or objective demonstration via sacrifice. Either will work.
I thought Hoagland put it well, for a supporter of the Administration.
Republican grown-ups are proving as elusive as Iranian Moderates or the Palestinian Mandela.
I’m staying out of the rest of this thread, since it’s mostly done, and mostly just the usual, anyway.
But I’d like to correct the historical record, and point out, for the sake of accuracy, and since no one else did, that Charles gets this wrong (though it’s a highly popular error): “I also agree that the U.S. was wrong to help engineer a coup which brought the Shah to power.”
This didn’t happen. The U.S. (with a little help and encouragement from Britain) engineered a coup which restored Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi to power, and dismissed Mossadeq. M. R. Pahlavi been Shah since September 16, 1941 (succeeding his forced-to-abdicate [by Britain and the Soviet Union] father). He briefly (for a bit over two weeks) fled to Rome, and returned, in August, 1953. The “coup” most definitely did not “bring him to power.”
(See here, and here.)
We now have an answer to who is appeasing the terrorists, and seeking to make a separate peace. Our ally Pakistan.
BTW, since this is CB’s thread, I tend to agree with LJ above that CB made a good point over in the “Taking it Outside” blogsite. It’d have been better if reporters had hounded Rumsfeld on the spot to say who he meant.
Sorry, but no such credit is merited, since CB’s “good point” is disingenuous given the reality that we face in the Bush “Information War” on the American people. (It is laughable for CB to suggest that the alleged Information War is directed at anyone outside America’s borders — in fact, there is no Information War by the Bush administration other than the internal political war)
The Bush administration would never allow such “hounding” to occur and would refuse to respond to any such hounding (in fact, they already have done so) — the Rumsfeld speech is a deliberate obfuscation of exactly to whom Rumsfeld is referring, and they intend to keep it vague. AP and others are left with no choice but to write about the obvious implications of Rumsfeld’s speech.
The AP got it largely right. If not, Rumsfeld or other Bush administration figures could correct AP’s “error” by simply identifying what Rumsfeld “really” meant. But that will never happen.
This is about generating a climate of hate and anger toward the unspecified “other” — all that is intended is to rally the 50% + 1 for the next round of voting. The hope is to hold supporters and rally true believers with this hate and anger.
And I see that the tactic still works to keep CB in the fold.
I will believe Charles has at least one sincere bone in his body when he writes a similarly critical post of the upcoming ABC production about 911. That represents a far more pernicious and deliberately false media effort than any right wing fantasy about liberal media bias, and will have a far more evil effect than any alleged misinterpretation by Burns of Rumsfeld’s remarks.