10/18 Brendan: Coulter goes even farther off the deep end
After reading the Washington Monthly's compilation of past statements by conservative commentator Ann Coulter, it seems hard to imagine how she could be any more strident or irresponsible. Not anymore.
Despite the National Review Online's decision to stop running her column and plagiarism charges from a former co-worker at Human Events, Coulter continues to turn up the volume. Her newest syndicated column opens with this jaw-dropper: "Liberals are up to their old tricks again. Twenty years of treason haven’t slowed them down."
It is difficult to condemn this statement strongly enough. Coulter is known for her sweeping ad hominem attacks, which we have strongly criticized. We’ve also denounced her recent foray into ethnic slurs. But making a cavalier charge of treason against American liberals is simply unconscionable, especially in a time of war. It is an accusation of criminal disloyalty against millions of Americans.
After claiming that liberals have "returned to their typical hysteria and defeatism", Coulter goes on to argue that the thought that America may lose the war on terrorism "perks [them] up ... because it reminds them of their favorite war - Vietnam. They are only disconsolate when America wins wars."
Mid-diatribe and in search of a new target, she then trots out this ethnic slur: "Camel-riding nomads may excel at the sucker punch, but wait until they see Western Civilization’s response". Of course, many of the terrorist hijackers were middle class college graduates, and Osama Bin Laden himself is a multi-millionaire from a wealthy Saudi Arabian family. But such complexity is always lost in Coulter's cartoonish worldview.
For her grand finale, Coulter attacks a New York Times editorial praising President Bush for "repeatedly extolling the crucial role of the federal government in providing for the safety of the American people":
If you support the Marines, then how in God's name can you oppose taxpayer-funded photos of bullwhips up men's anuses? At least I think that's the logic.
Coulter's propagandizing has become completely incoherent. This is a farcically heavy-handed and illogical attempt to inflame readers with no relevance to the Times editorial.
In general, these grossly manipulative arguments are shameful. But the charges of treason Coulter levels against liberals deserve especially strong condemnation from all quarters.
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Related links:
-Coulter uses rhetorical tricks to manufacture support for deportation plan (Bryan Keefer, 10/04)
-Coulter advocates profiling of Arab "aliens," deportation (Bryan Keefer, 9/21)
-Is Rational Discourse Another Casualty of Tuesday's Attacks? (Ben Fritz, 9/17)
-Coulter just won't give up on Clinton-Condit association (Bryan Keefer, 8/31)
-Spinning Chandra: Making the Condit Affair Partisan (Bryan Keefer, 7/23)
-Ann Coulter: The Jargon Vanguard (Brendan Nyhan, 7/16)
10/18/2001 02:19:21 PM EST |
10/17 Bryan: Sullivan twists Chomsky's words
In a post on his web site, Andrew Sullivan takes a quote from MIT linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky out of context in order to lead his readers to the conclusion that Chomsky advocates terrorism.
Sullivan draws on an excellent dissection of Chomsky's views on American foreign policy by Indiana University professor Jeffrey C. Isaac in The American Prospect Online. Isaac picks apart Chomsky's argument that much of US foreign policy consists of "apologetics for state violence" by criticizing Chomsky's implicit comparison of US policy to terrorist attacks, using this quote from Chomsky's A New Generation Draws the Line: Kosovo, East Timor and the Standards of the West to illustrate the point:
The huge slaughter. . . in East Timor is (at least) comparable to the terrible atrocities that can plausibly be attributed to Milosevic in the earlier wars in Yugoslavia, and responsibility is far easier to assign, with no complicating factors. If proponents of the "repetition of Bosnia" thesis intend it seriously, they should certainly have been calling for the bombing of Jakarta -- indeed Washington and London -- in early 1999 so as not to allow in East Timor a repetition of the crimes that Indonesia, the U.S., and the UK, had perpetrated there for a quarter-century. And when the new generation of leaders [an allusion to President Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair] refused to pursue this honorable course, they should have been leading honest citizens to do so themselves, perhaps joining the Bin Laden network. These conclusions follow straightforwardly, if we assume that the thesis is intended as something more than apologetics for state violence.
To his credit, Isaac notes that Chomsky is not actually condoning terrorist attacks, though he is using them as an inflammatory point of comparison to attack US foreign policy. Isaac then proceeds to dismantle Chomsky's assumptions, concluding that since Chomsky sees both terrorism and much of US foreign policy as roughly equivalent, his refusal to propose an alternative way for the US to intervene in international affairs amounts to nothing more than "cynicism."
Sullivan, however, takes Isaac's analysis and twists it to fit his own purpose. Calling the passage from Chomsky an "obscenity," Sullivan ignores Isaac's carefully-made point that Chomsky does not endorse terror attacks:
Thus the nihilism that fuels Chomsky and [Stanley] Fish and others leads inexorably to a call for individuals to join the bin Laden network and bomb Washington and London. Chomsky wrote this before September 11. In the wake of the fact that terrorists took his cynical, rhetorical advice and actually killed thousands of people in Washington and New York, is it too much to ask that Chomsky take responsibility for his words, disown them, and apologize?
Of course, Chomsky is not offering "advice" in the passage quoted in Isaac's article, inflammatory as the comparison of US policy and terrorism may be. Nor is Chomsky calling for people to "join the bin Laden network and bomb Washington and London" as Sullivan asserts. By taking Chomsky's words completely out of context either through laziness or intentional deception, Sullivan plays on and reinforces the prejudices of his largely conservative readership against Chomsky. Unlike Isaac's well-reasoned critique, Sullivan's histrionics are not a contribution to the public debate. One can only hope that Sullivan's unfair manipulations penetrate the media no further than his own web site.
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Related links:
-Andrew Sullivan’s "Fifth Column" rhetoric (Brendan Nyhan, 9/20)
-Is Rational Discourse Another Casualty of Tuesday's Attacks? (Ben Fritz, 9/17)
-Complex issue, simple spin - Sullivan on welfare reform (Ben Fritz, 8/14)
-Sullivan slammed unfairly (Brendan Nyhan, 6/19)
-Sullivan says deceive the public (Brendan Nyhan, 5/7)
10/17/2001 01:17:05 PM EST |
10/16 Brendan: The discourse of mental illness
One of the defining features of recent American political discourse is the routine use of allegations of mental illness to discredit opponents or the positions they hold. When a pundit or politician wants to shift a debate from rational discussion of public policy to non-rational perceptions of their opponents, it's now an accepted method of argument to simply assert that they are crazy and that's the only explanation for their positions or behavior.
Joe Conason's recent New York Observer column is a classic example of this. Conason seeks to discredit House Republican opponents of federalizing airport security. So, in addition to a steady stream of insults, he asserts that their opposition to the Democratic position on airport security is symptomatic of mental illness (emphasis added):
Clowning aside, post-traumatic stress disorder surely afflicts dozens of Congressional conservatives, whose conduct increasingly defies rationality. Their inability to cope, however, doesn't excuse their attempts to obstruct overdue measures to upgrade aviation safety and revitalize the economy...
Unsurprisingly, the campaign to prevent a federal takeover of this vital function-now so miserably performed by private companies-is led by Texans Tom DeLay and Dick Armey and the irrepressible Georgian, Bob Barr. These are the same characters whose primitive priorities have, in the recent past, prevented chemical "tagging" of explosives to allow easier tracing of terrorist perps by federal authorities...
In the mouths of such politicians, conservative ideology sounds like a mental pathology.
Conason is demagogically appealing to perceptions of House Republicans as "primitive", irrational and pathological, and even goes so far as to name a specific mental disorder that they are supposedly afflicted by (such is the level to which this discourse has been refined). This kind of rhetoric trivializes the very real problems faced by people with mental illness.
Moreover, a logical argument would actually explain conservative opposition and why Conason thinks it is misguided. Surely, the issue is more complex than simple GOP opposition to "federal takeover of this vital function". As Lizette Alvarez of the New York Times notes, House Republicans are not in favor of the status quo. They "prefer a bill that would put the federal government in charge of supervising and training private security workers and terminating contracts with their security firms". This ability to hire and fire firms based on performance, some Republicans argue, is superior to what could become a bureaucracy of entrenched government workers who cannot be removed from the job. In fact, many point out that Israel and many European countries lauded for high security standards employ private firms under close government supervision.
Is this a good argument? Readers can't develop an informed view reading Conason, who fails to make a rational case against federalization. After calling conservatives mentally ill, he sets up a straw man hypothetical in which he asks readers to "[c]hoose one or more to help protect your family from a gang of crazed killers" from amongst a police officer, firefighter, emergency-service worker and a underpaid, poorly trained airport security guard.
Since Conason wrote the column, an aviation security bill federalizing aviation security passed the Senate with the support of many conservatives. The fight is now on for real in the House. Let's hope that no one takes a page from Conason's book.
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Related links:
-Dowd's ad-hoc psychologizing (Bryan Keefer, 9/6)
-Daschle-bashing 102 - Armchair psychology and the "energy crisis" (Bryan Keefer, 5/30)
10/16/2001 08:10:58 PM EST |
By Brendan Nyhan
The role of oil politics in the war against the Taliban has been
neglected until recently. Afghanistan is strategically crucial
in the race to develop large oil and gas reserves in Central
Asia. However, the issue is regrettably being twisted into
anti-Bush screeds already, notably by syndicated columnist Ted
Rall, who has written one of the most irresponsible pieces since
the September 11 attacks. (read the column)
10/15/2001 07:39:53 AM EST |
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