Deconstructing Joe, part 1
Live blogging from Democratic Headquarters in
Groton. If this post lacks logical structure, it's because this is a distracting
atmosphere.
Ordinarily no masochist, I nonetheless read Joe Lieberman's entire speech setting forth his position on Iraq. It's the position he just came up with, because as you may recall, a few days ago he didn't have one . Today Joe rolled out his position, in a speech oozing with mendacity and sleaze. I copied it to one of my handy dandy computer notebooks and started highlighting the portions that I thought deserved refutation. Well, everything started turning yellow, so I decided to approach this mammoth tasks in small bites, for as long as I can stand it. Today's entry, more or less, examines the introduction, in which Joe introduces the premises that should guide our examination of this issue.
I will, by the way, not bother discussing Joe's misrepresentation of Ned's position on the war, on the assumption that lots of people will be doing that.
So, let's get going. These quotes may not appear in the order they appear in the speech. First one up:
Let me begin by briefly recounting how we got here. I supported the use of force in Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from power because I believed that he was a grave threat to our country, his people, and the world. And I continue to believe that decision was right.
Gosh, not a word about those WMD he was always talking about back then. I wonder why. But give him credit. He takes a strong stand. He was right to vote the way he did, and that certainly justifies his right to tell us how to proceed right now. Of course, if he was wrong, then maybe that would be a telling point. But no, because as Joe explains, bringing up the fact that the path to war was littered with lies and incompetence is off-limits:
But the fact is, as vexing and painful as this situation is today, we don't have the luxury of playing "what if" games with the past. As Churchill said when some of his supporters wanted to focus on investigating the actions of his predecessor, "if the present tries to sit in judgment of the past, it will lose the future."
Well, shut my mouth, if you can quote Churchill, in or out of context, you must be a winner. But how about this one: "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it".
Joe tells us he was right. We can't even say that he was wrong, because doing so is pointless.
There's a more fundamental problem with Joe's logic, if you can distinguish his thought processes with that name. Joe is asking us to forget not just that the justification for the war was a lie. He is asking us to trust the people, including himself, who were so wrong at the time, to fix up the mess. Joe is like a guy who decided to stir up a hornet's nest. Lots of folks told him not to do it because the hornets would start stinging. Not only did he do it anyway, with predictable results, but to this day he dismisses and demeans the people who warned him. Now he tells us we should forget all that, and leave it to him to fix the problem by: Guess how? Stirring the nest some more! This after the latest NIE confirms what we all knew, that the longer we stir, the more hornets we'll get.
No rule of formal logic compels the conclusion that a person who has been consistently wrong about something will always be wrong about that subject. However, experience suggests that it is unlikely that such a person will be right, particularly when he refuses to concede his original error and insists that the path to success lies in following the same path that has led to disaster. So, it's not just a question of playing "what if" games with the past. We are playing "what if" games with the future, and Lieberman never addresses the fundamental question: why should those who shaped our present with disastrous results shape our future, his off-again on-again calls for Rumsfeld's head notwithstanding.
So, Joe has defined one fundamental premise that must guide the debate. According to Joe, we must approach Iraq as a tabula rasa. We should seek not to know how we got here, but we should nonetheless defer to those who got us here.
The next premise: we should eschew politically motivated attacks and discuss these issues dispassionately, so long as it is understood that the eschewed attacks are those directed at war supporters:
And I have not hesitated to speak out about the mistakes the Bush Administration has made, mistakes that have made this war more costly than it should have been. But I have worked hard to stay away from partisan political attacks because that is unacceptable when our nation is at war.
It sure would be nice to get a definition of "partisan political attacks". Okay, I've got it! Joe's attacks on everyone who questions the wisdom of this war or those who have messed it up from day one are not "partisan" because the people he attacks are all Democrats. Since he still claims to be a Democrat, those attacks are not "partisan". That must be it. It is, of course, acceptable to attack those within your own party, and it's perfectly okay to cheer the Republicans on while they savage the people with whom you are supposedly affiliated.
But am I being unfair, or, perish the thought, cynical? Isn't Joe denouncing attacks on people of all political stripes:
As I have said before, it is wrong to dismiss those who are skeptical or oppose the war as being soft on terror – or even worse, as unpatriotic. That has to stop.
He must mean people who say stuff like this:
"If we just pick up like Ned Lamont wants us to do, get out by a date certain, it will be taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England. It will strengthen them and they will strike again.”
Oh, wait. That would be Joe, wouldn't it. How strange. Stranger still, that as we go on the speech, we find once again that Ned is enabling terrorists:
The truth is, Lamont's plan is not a plan for changing course. This is a plan for giving up in Iraq. For giving up on Iraq's hopes for becoming free and independent. And for giving up Iraq to the sectarian militias, to the terrorists, and to the Iranians and Syrians who would exploit the resulting chaos.
So Joe has pretty much set the stage. Unfortunately, before he can get to the meat of his speech, he must do two things. Deal with that poorly timed National Intelligence Estimate and distorting Ned Lamont's position. As I said, I'll leave the distortions to someone else. As to the NIE, here's what he has to say:
Those critical early mistakes -- especially our initial lack of troop strength to better secure Iraq and its borders --continue to reverberate today, as the National Intelligence Estimate that just came to light indicates.
That's it for the NIE, except for a distortion later in the speech ("As bad as the terrorist situation on the ground is now in Iraq and all over the world, the NIE suggests that it will only grow exponentially worse if we follow the Lamont plan and rush our troops out to meet an arbitrary, politically pre-set deadline nine months from now." Since the NIE has not been released, Lieberman can only know what has been in the newspapers. Neither the Times nor the Post reported anything along these lines.)
As Ned pointed out to Joe in a letter , and as almost everyone else has noted, the NIE actually concluded that the war in Iraq has fostered terrorism world wide, and that it would continue to do so as long as we stay there stirring the nest. Unfortunately, that poses two problems for Joe.
First, for the moment, at least until he thinks people have forgotten the NIE, he can't claim that we are safer now than before the war. He'll have to put that aside. Second, he has to deal with the NIE somehow, since it's in the news. Answer: misrepresent the thrust of its conclusions. One can argue, I suppose, that the initial mistakes of the war (which I thought we weren't supposed to talk about) caused our current situation, but that's not the point of the report. It apparently states that our continued presence is exacerbating the problem. How does Joe square that conclusion with his position? He doesn't.
So the stage is set. Here are the premises that we should accept as we listen to Joe's speech. We should not examine the roots of this war, because doing so would be fruitless and anyway, it would reflect poorly on Joe. The fact that someone has been consistently wrong is no reason to doubt their judgment about what we should do in the future. A corrollary: the fact that others have been consistently right is reason to question not only their judgment, but their patriotism. We should not engage in "partisan" attacks on those who supported the war, but attacking those who opposed it is perfectly legitimate. And rather than squarely meet the conclusions of the Intelligence community that support your opponent's position, you shrug them off, in the faith based assurance that facts don't matter when stacked up against your own infallibility.
Tomorrow, if I can muster up the energy, we'll look at Joe's "plan".
Ordinarily no masochist, I nonetheless read Joe Lieberman's entire speech setting forth his position on Iraq. It's the position he just came up with, because as you may recall, a few days ago he didn't have one . Today Joe rolled out his position, in a speech oozing with mendacity and sleaze. I copied it to one of my handy dandy computer notebooks and started highlighting the portions that I thought deserved refutation. Well, everything started turning yellow, so I decided to approach this mammoth tasks in small bites, for as long as I can stand it. Today's entry, more or less, examines the introduction, in which Joe introduces the premises that should guide our examination of this issue.
I will, by the way, not bother discussing Joe's misrepresentation of Ned's position on the war, on the assumption that lots of people will be doing that.
So, let's get going. These quotes may not appear in the order they appear in the speech. First one up:
Let me begin by briefly recounting how we got here. I supported the use of force in Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from power because I believed that he was a grave threat to our country, his people, and the world. And I continue to believe that decision was right.
Gosh, not a word about those WMD he was always talking about back then. I wonder why. But give him credit. He takes a strong stand. He was right to vote the way he did, and that certainly justifies his right to tell us how to proceed right now. Of course, if he was wrong, then maybe that would be a telling point. But no, because as Joe explains, bringing up the fact that the path to war was littered with lies and incompetence is off-limits:
But the fact is, as vexing and painful as this situation is today, we don't have the luxury of playing "what if" games with the past. As Churchill said when some of his supporters wanted to focus on investigating the actions of his predecessor, "if the present tries to sit in judgment of the past, it will lose the future."
Well, shut my mouth, if you can quote Churchill, in or out of context, you must be a winner. But how about this one: "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it".
Joe tells us he was right. We can't even say that he was wrong, because doing so is pointless.
There's a more fundamental problem with Joe's logic, if you can distinguish his thought processes with that name. Joe is asking us to forget not just that the justification for the war was a lie. He is asking us to trust the people, including himself, who were so wrong at the time, to fix up the mess. Joe is like a guy who decided to stir up a hornet's nest. Lots of folks told him not to do it because the hornets would start stinging. Not only did he do it anyway, with predictable results, but to this day he dismisses and demeans the people who warned him. Now he tells us we should forget all that, and leave it to him to fix the problem by: Guess how? Stirring the nest some more! This after the latest NIE confirms what we all knew, that the longer we stir, the more hornets we'll get.
No rule of formal logic compels the conclusion that a person who has been consistently wrong about something will always be wrong about that subject. However, experience suggests that it is unlikely that such a person will be right, particularly when he refuses to concede his original error and insists that the path to success lies in following the same path that has led to disaster. So, it's not just a question of playing "what if" games with the past. We are playing "what if" games with the future, and Lieberman never addresses the fundamental question: why should those who shaped our present with disastrous results shape our future, his off-again on-again calls for Rumsfeld's head notwithstanding.
So, Joe has defined one fundamental premise that must guide the debate. According to Joe, we must approach Iraq as a tabula rasa. We should seek not to know how we got here, but we should nonetheless defer to those who got us here.
The next premise: we should eschew politically motivated attacks and discuss these issues dispassionately, so long as it is understood that the eschewed attacks are those directed at war supporters:
And I have not hesitated to speak out about the mistakes the Bush Administration has made, mistakes that have made this war more costly than it should have been. But I have worked hard to stay away from partisan political attacks because that is unacceptable when our nation is at war.
It sure would be nice to get a definition of "partisan political attacks". Okay, I've got it! Joe's attacks on everyone who questions the wisdom of this war or those who have messed it up from day one are not "partisan" because the people he attacks are all Democrats. Since he still claims to be a Democrat, those attacks are not "partisan". That must be it. It is, of course, acceptable to attack those within your own party, and it's perfectly okay to cheer the Republicans on while they savage the people with whom you are supposedly affiliated.
But am I being unfair, or, perish the thought, cynical? Isn't Joe denouncing attacks on people of all political stripes:
As I have said before, it is wrong to dismiss those who are skeptical or oppose the war as being soft on terror – or even worse, as unpatriotic. That has to stop.
He must mean people who say stuff like this:
"If we just pick up like Ned Lamont wants us to do, get out by a date certain, it will be taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England. It will strengthen them and they will strike again.”
Oh, wait. That would be Joe, wouldn't it. How strange. Stranger still, that as we go on the speech, we find once again that Ned is enabling terrorists:
The truth is, Lamont's plan is not a plan for changing course. This is a plan for giving up in Iraq. For giving up on Iraq's hopes for becoming free and independent. And for giving up Iraq to the sectarian militias, to the terrorists, and to the Iranians and Syrians who would exploit the resulting chaos.
So Joe has pretty much set the stage. Unfortunately, before he can get to the meat of his speech, he must do two things. Deal with that poorly timed National Intelligence Estimate and distorting Ned Lamont's position. As I said, I'll leave the distortions to someone else. As to the NIE, here's what he has to say:
Those critical early mistakes -- especially our initial lack of troop strength to better secure Iraq and its borders --continue to reverberate today, as the National Intelligence Estimate that just came to light indicates.
That's it for the NIE, except for a distortion later in the speech ("As bad as the terrorist situation on the ground is now in Iraq and all over the world, the NIE suggests that it will only grow exponentially worse if we follow the Lamont plan and rush our troops out to meet an arbitrary, politically pre-set deadline nine months from now." Since the NIE has not been released, Lieberman can only know what has been in the newspapers. Neither the Times nor the Post reported anything along these lines.)
As Ned pointed out to Joe in a letter , and as almost everyone else has noted, the NIE actually concluded that the war in Iraq has fostered terrorism world wide, and that it would continue to do so as long as we stay there stirring the nest. Unfortunately, that poses two problems for Joe.
First, for the moment, at least until he thinks people have forgotten the NIE, he can't claim that we are safer now than before the war. He'll have to put that aside. Second, he has to deal with the NIE somehow, since it's in the news. Answer: misrepresent the thrust of its conclusions. One can argue, I suppose, that the initial mistakes of the war (which I thought we weren't supposed to talk about) caused our current situation, but that's not the point of the report. It apparently states that our continued presence is exacerbating the problem. How does Joe square that conclusion with his position? He doesn't.
So the stage is set. Here are the premises that we should accept as we listen to Joe's speech. We should not examine the roots of this war, because doing so would be fruitless and anyway, it would reflect poorly on Joe. The fact that someone has been consistently wrong is no reason to doubt their judgment about what we should do in the future. A corrollary: the fact that others have been consistently right is reason to question not only their judgment, but their patriotism. We should not engage in "partisan" attacks on those who supported the war, but attacking those who opposed it is perfectly legitimate. And rather than squarely meet the conclusions of the Intelligence community that support your opponent's position, you shrug them off, in the faith based assurance that facts don't matter when stacked up against your own infallibility.
Tomorrow, if I can muster up the energy, we'll look at Joe's "plan".
Posted: Monday - September 25, 2006 at 06:12 PM
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