Gerson's Continuing Condescension

You might think that the nation's dumbest columnist would hesitate before being condescending to his readers, but no... today he even gives his brand of condescension a fair label, Faith-Based Condescension.

My regular readers (all three of you? ;-) ) may recall this suggestion from a few weeks back - a campaign ad poking fun at McCain's attacks on Obama's credentials:

I appreciate your work for civil rights. Me, I've fought my entire life for equal rights for everyone. But aren't you being presumptuous? You did some good things as a lawyer back in Illinois, but you're trying to become commander in chief. These are troubled times, my friend, times of war. You've never been on a battlefield. You've never commanded soldiers. What makes you think that you can govern a divided nation and defend our way of life?

Sorry, Mr. Lincoln, I just don't think you're qualified.

That was then, this is now. Lincoln is now used to defend Palin's lack of qualification:

There are reasons to question the choice of the commander of the Alaska National Guard as a prospective commander in chief (though there were equally serious reasons to doubt the military qualifications of another backwoods candidate, Abraham Lincoln, who served for a few months as a private and a captain in the Black Hawk War).¹

See? She's just like Lincoln, so she's qualified.

Except "Honest Abe" would not have pretended his military record qualified him for the Presidency. It takes a great deal of chutzpah to argue that being in a state that's near Russia, or being commander in chief of a state's national guard but not making any decisions pertaining to state or national security, qualify you for higher office.

Now Gerson could have addressed the issue of Palin's qualifications honestly, but that would presuppose that he's an honest man. His brand of faith-based condescension does not involve honesty:

But instead of engaging this issue, liberals have been drawn, helpless and mesmerized -- like beetles to the vivid, blue paradise of the bug zapper -- toward criticizing Sarah Palin's religion.

Well... No. The mainstream coverage has almost exclusively focused on her qualifications. Her religious beliefs and questions they implicate have been raised, but not with any greater disrespect than those questions raised by the polical right about Sen. Lieberman's observation of the Sabbath back in 2000. And certainly nothing like the suspicion poured on JFK over his Catholicism. Sure, you can find people who will say and argue pretty much anything, but we're talking about the mainstream here, aren't we? Well, obviously not - that would be the honest approach, but it doesn't suit Gerson's purposes.

Gerson gives one quote - only one - to show the unfair treatment of Palin, and of course he doesn't attribute it. And, can you believe it... he's quoting the professionally ranting rabid athest, Christopher Hitchens.

She has inarticulately said that her gubernatorial work would be hampered "if the people of Alaska's heart isn't right with god." Her local shout-and-holler tabernacle apparently believes that Jews can be converted to Jesus and homosexuals can be "cured."

Hitchens is his best example of a "liberal" who is unfair to Palin? And why is he only complaining that Hitchens was unfair in describing Palin's church as opposed to her beliefs? Wasn't that part of what Hitchens sad vastly more relevant than whether he was fair in his description of her church? Gerson also lies by omission, failing to note that Hitchens also attacked Obama's religion:

Interviewed by Rick Warren at the grotesque Saddleback megachurch a short while ago, Sen. Barack Obama announced that Jesus had died on the cross to redeem him personally. How he knew this he did not say. But it will make it exceedingly difficult for him, or his outriders and apologists, to ridicule Palin for her own ludicrous biblical literalist beliefs.

Gerson gets even less honest from there. After suggesting that it's unfair to even ask Palin about her religious beliefs, he speaks of the role of religion in the advancement of "liberty, tolerance and pluralism". Yet even here he's internally inconsistent:

And, of course, Palin is portrayed as a "theocrat" -- a Muslim fundamentalist in lipstick.

If religion, per se, leads to these advancements, Gerson might have a point. But Gerson is also implicitly condemning Islam, and particularly Islamic fundamentalism. Gerson doesn't want Palin questioned because he agrees with her, but makes it obvious that he has no faith in other faiths - if she were Muslim, he would be among those waving a torch or a pitchfork. And so the lies continue:

Democratic politicians press their appeal to blue-collar workers and the working poor -- while liberal intellectuals and pundits express their disdain for the religious values and motivations of the poor and middle class themselves.

Except it's not onlyDemocrats and "liberal intellectuals" who are concerned about the role of religion in the political sphere. And that's true even if we presuppose that all of the founding fathers were Democrats and liberals. There are conservatives who are skeptical of Palin. And as we just discussed, when the shoe is on the other foot Gerson is among the first on the attack. His faith-based condescension toward secular values seeps out of his every word. His faith-based disdain for the religious values and motivations of Muslims is also patent. His leading concern is Christianity, and moreso his own personal brand of Christianity. Condescend toward any other belief, and you're still okay in his book - in fact, you're following his lead.

Meanwhile, in case you're taking notes, beyond his self-parodic comarison of Palin to Lincoln, Gerson never got around to actually telling us that he sees Palin as even slightly qualified for national office.
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1. Lincoln was not involved in military action during his brief enlistments.

Tails, You Lose

A while back I proposed,

If you wish to assert that something is not torture, you subject yourself to the technique at the hands of those who disagree. If, after a standard application of the technique, you continue to insist that the technique is not torture, you win! If you confess that it is torture, even if just to get things to stop, you lose.

Although my challenge likely fell far below his radar screen, other similar challenges did not - and Christopher Hitchens decided to prove the challengers wrong.

The "official lie" about waterboarding, Hitchens says, is that it "simulates the feeling of drowning". In fact, "you are drowning - or rather, being drowned".

He rehearses the intellectual arguments, both for ("It's nothing compared to what they do to us") and against ("It opens a door that can't be closed"). But the Hitch's thoroughly empirical conclusion is simple. As Vanity Fair's title puts it: "Believe me, it's torture."

I'm a bit surprised that it took the experience of being waterboarded for Hitchens to recognize something so obvious, and if he refreshes his memory on the history of waterboarding he will discover that this is one of the techniques we have historically complained about "them" doing to "us", and some of our ideas were taken from "them" (even though "they" used the same techniques on "us" to elicit false confessions), but I'll give him credit for being honest about his experience.

How long did it take between the start of the exercise and when Hitchens signaled "unbearable distress" causing the exercise to stop? Approximately 16 seconds. He relates,

Also, in case it’s of interest, I have since woken up trying to push the bedcovers off my face, and if I do anything that makes me short of breath I find myself clawing at the air with a horrible sensation of smothering and claustrophobia.

His realization,

Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

Almost in the next breath, he retreats from those words:

When contrasted to actual torture, waterboarding is more like foreplay. No thumbscrew, no pincers, no electrodes, no rack. Can one say this of those who have been captured by the tormentors and murderers of (say) Daniel Pearl? On this analysis, any call to indict the United States for torture is therefore a lame and diseased attempt to arrive at a moral equivalence between those who defend civilization and those who exploit its freedoms to hollow it out, and ultimately to bring it down. I myself do not trust anybody who does not clearly understand this viewpoint.

Hitchens continues, explaining why he still (now) comes down against waterboarding. But he seems to have forgotten another point of history - the forms of torture that don't leave marks were developed in no small part because they are as effective, or more effective, than those that do, by regimes that wanted plausible deniability when western groups challenged them as torturing political prisoners. Also, how much thought does it take to realize that torture that leaves you "unmarked and undamaged and indeed ready for another bout in quite a short time" is likely to be far more beneficial to your interrogator than torture that leaves you unresponsive or kills you.

Hitchens' voluntary sixteen seconds (and a second round of an undisclosed duration) gave him hints of post-traumatic stress disorder. What if he couldn't have called off the exercise - if he would have been waterboarded again and again until he disclosed whatever it was his interrogators sought to learn (whether or not he had that information)? Wait - let's ask Hitchens (from the video):

It would be bad enough if you did have something ... but what if you didn't have anything? What if they'd got the wrong guy? Then you would really, you'd be in danger of losing your mind very quickly, I think.

Because if it makes you lose your mind but doesn't leave a scar, it's not "real" torture?

Liars, Liars Everywhere....

Is anybody else tired of the silly accusations that are launched back and forth between Clinton and Obama supporters? With every mistake of memory, large or small, cast as an evil lie that totally disqualifies the candidate for office? Take this example from the latest of the tiresome streams of anti-Obama screeds on TalkLeft. In 1996, twelve years ago, Obama scrawled a few notes on a questionnaire about his political positions. An aide completed the questionnaire and returned it. Somebody apparently asked Obama about the differences in his opinions as expressed on the questionnaire and those expressed in public, and the difference was attributed to the aide's submitting the questionnaire without review. So we get, "Ah hah! If we take the least consistent interpretation of his notes, and insist that the only way a 12-year-old memory of a forgettable moment can deviate from the truth is due to intentional deception, Obama is a liar!"

Wow. How compelling.

A lot of this "he's a liar" stuff is being kicked up in response to Hillary Clinton's rather amazing story of her trip to Bosnia. That inspired my earlier post on the vagaries of memory, although it was not meant as a perfect defense. When memory departs from historical fact, you're not "lying" when you misremember. CWD commented that he wouldn't much care for a politician whose memory was quite that malleable, particularly in relation to dramatic moments experienced as an adult. That's a fair position to take, although peripheral to my point about memory.

In the Obama example, he may be lying. Perhaps he did review the answers before they were submitted. Perhaps at the start of his career he did take a slightly different position on issues of gun control and the death penalty, whether out of personal belief or political expediency, and his needs or views have changed. Perhaps an aide really did misunderstand his scrawls, then completed and returned the questionnaire in a manner not entirely consistent with Obama's views. If Obama's being dishonest, it's a pretty standard version of dishonesty for a politician - shading or moving away from past political positions that may harm the present campaign. But he may also be telling the truth, or recounting the story as he remembers it.

In a lot of these cases, conception seems to matter more than reality. In some contexts, the preconception of the opposing candidate leads to an exaggerated response to a "lie" (real or perceived). In other contexts, the response to the "lie" is a deliberate effort to try to shift popular perceptions against a candidate - classic, Karl Rove style gotcha politics. To see both in action, let's turn to the inimitable Christopher Hitchens. March 5, before the Bosnia blowup:

Hugh Hewitt: 20 seconds, who’s going to be the next president of the United States?

Christopher Hitchens: Hillary Clinton.

Hugh Hewitt: Oh…because of yesterday?

Christopher Hitchens: No, no, I’ve feared it for a long time, and there’s something horrible and undefeatable about people who have no life except the worship of power.

Hugh Hewitt: The Mummy is back.

Christopher Hitchens: …people who don’t want the meeting to end, the people who just are unstoppable, who only have one focus, no humanity, no character, nothing but the worship of money and power. They win in the end.

Hugh Hewitt: Mordor. Christopher Hitchens, a pleasure. Thank you for joining us from Vanity Fair.

Hitchens is entirely consistent here - he's been bashing the Clintons pretty much since day one. The Bosnia claims are a useful tool, but get jammed into his pre-existing narrative. So now we get,

The first [form of lying] involves what seems to be most obvious in the present case: the putting forward of a bogus or misleading account of events. But the second, and often the more serious, means that the liar in question has also attempted to bury or to obscure something that actually is true. Let us examine how Sen. Clinton has managed to commit both of these offenses to veracity and decency and how in doing so she has rivaled, if not indeed surpassed, the disbarred and perjured hack who is her husband and tutor.

(Is Hitchens "the thinking man's Ann Coulter"? Some smart people seem to like him, despite his preference for invective over honest debate.)

Hitchens argues that landing in a war zone under fire is unforgettable, then makes the leap of illogic that since he can't forget his own experience landing under fire it is impossible for somebody to believe it has occurred when it has not. He then goes on to suggest that Hillary Clinton was the driving force behind the delayed U.S. military intervention in Bosnia, because intervention would supposedly overshadow her healthcare initiative.

Hitchens assures us, that's exactly the way he remembers it. I'm sure it is. But he needs to consider that he views his memories through his prism of Clinton-hatred. If he doesn't realize that, perhaps he believes that his childish name-calling serves as a clarion call. If he does, this is just strongly worded political advocacy. Maybe he's just preaching to the choir.

To me, though, this also raises questions about Hitchens, as it appears that despite the Iraq debacle he still perceives military intervention as a humanitarian obligation. He reinvents history, sometimes quite literally, to advance a particular agenda. The Iraq war had to be fought for humanitarian reasons, and every flaw in its planning, execution, and in the subsequent occupation should be ignored - if everything had been done "correctly" it really would have been "candy, flowers, and democracy breaking out all over." You can't let such mundane things as reality interfere with your good intentions. There was no reason good enough for Bill Clinton to not immediately intercede in Bosnia, as to Hitchens no such reason can possibly exist.

Through his Clinton-hating prism, he attributes failure to the most vain and petty of motives, and to the extent that other interpretations may exist he is happy to disregard political, practical and diplomatic realities. And when confronted with reality, rather than dealing with the facts he bristles and responds with a series of condescending insults and bromides.

Doesn't that make him a pretty good example of everything he claims to hate about the Clintons? His worship of power is more acceptable, because he wishes to direct that power at causes he perceives as righteous as opposed to selfish?

An honest case can be made that Hillary Clinton's memory raises serious questions about her candidacy. But that doesn't justify anti-Obama "your candidate's a liar, too" exaggerations, nor does it justify pushing the story into overdrive (hyperdrive) to advance an almost conspiratorial anti-Clinton agenda.