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I repeat, *anyone reading McCarthy’s argument can see through it and recognize that his statements about John McCain are slime. McCarthy rests his entire case on the “ticking bomb” scenario – which is a fundamentally dishonest argument.*

reg, first, on the selective quotes thing, all quotes are selective. I don’t think i used the poll for example to say sweepingly that it portrays everything about the left or proved my point. Whereas you used Mccarthy’s quote as a tactic to avoid answering or confronting his argumetns, which you still haven’t done.

As for Scheer, you’ve backhandedly acquiesced to my point in saying that I’m trying to divert attention from the dishonesty that took place.

No I’m not. if there was some serious level of bullshit at some point in all of this, that’s very bad. But that’s a different discussion (and one we’d also probably disagree on, by the way; there was a Washington Post mea culpa article a couple weeks after the incident that did a good job of describing a train of mistakes, over-eager PR guys, and over-eager reporting. Which, again, were discovered and began to fall apart literally imediately, which, as I tried to convey, is not a trivial fact in deciding whether this was some kind of conspiracy).

My point is Scheer: he labeled the thing an utter fraud, debasing both Lynch’s experiences and the genuine heroism of the rescuers. He labeled the thing a calssic WH-perpetrated wag-the-dog incident. He did these things in defiance of facts that if he didn’t know he is careless to the extreme; i actually do him a favor of a sort in deciding he was dishonest.

In calling the rescue a fraud he quoted the work of a British journalist who had said – unequivocally and before Scheer’s column – that the rescue was not at all a fraud. The journalist was merely in the process of uncovering the reality I describe above.

The point I’m making about Scheer stands on its own. His columns were clear, undeniable dishonesty. They were lies. They helped propagate a well-worn myth of the left that stands to this day, and to be truthful, I believe that was his intent. He played his readers for suckers, and it worked, and if I were you, and Marc Cooper, that would make me very very angry.

Oh my, Paul. I forgot. We aren’t supposed to use “selective quotes” here. That would be wrong. (Of course, “selective polls” are okay. Also, anyone reading McCarthy’s argument can see through it and recognize that his statements about John McCain are slime. McCarthy rests his entire case on the “ticking bomb” scenario – which is a fundamentally dishonest argument.)

As for asserting Bob Scheer is the guy we should abjure for manufacturing falsehoods about the Jessica Lynch story, you slide far into the abyss. There’s a dishonesty problem afoot in your argument, but it’s not Scheer’s. The military – at a fairly high level – started the controversy by releasing an essentially fabricated version of events complete with an edited video tape. Your tortured rationalization of every issue that was taken with the story doesn’t debunk a single one of the critics facts, only their interpretation. Perhaps Scheer shouldn’t have written “White House”, but left it at “Pentagon”. Perhaps this was “inartful wording”. Your contribution to the Lynch saga is an obvious attempt to put positive spin on a version of the events that was proven to be blatantly and deliberately dishonest in the first place. Taking the side of liars doesn’t give you license to call their critics the liars because you think their interpretations may have exaggerated the scope of the proven dishonesty.

So the points abut the Lynch rescure, boiled down, are this:

It may be true that some doctors at teh hospital tried to return her before the rescue, but there is absolutely np evidence that anyone on thw American side knew this, and any shots fired at the doctors as they were approaching (if that happened) were honest shots in a chaotic situation.

Reports of Lynch fighting heroically before her capture were a. perfectly plausible; b. based on honest military misintepretation of battlefield communication passed along by a pr flack; c. quiclyl corrected with absolutely no interference from anyone remotely connected with the White House.

I don;t recall where the stories of fighting in teh hospital itself came from, or how widespread they were, by they also were quickly corrected with no interference from above, and the inaccuracies of that story served to obscure the fact that the rescue proceeded through an area that was still a war zone and was in fact, from the perspective of both the rescuers and Lynch, a risky endeavor.

So bascally, to repeat: the inaccuracies were locally based, attributable at least as much to over-eager press reporting as to any hyping by PR guys, somewhat undesrtandable, and served to obscure the undeniably reisky nature of the operation. And had nothing to do with the White House.

Scheer chose not once but twice to make the case that the whole edneavor was a charade, part and parcel of the BS White House operation, utterly unnecessary and comparable to “Wag The Dog;” and he did this not merely based on skimpy evdence but after his own sources and journalists he was referring to were saying that version of things was nonsense.

He consciously misrepresented reality in order to make the administration in this case seem as venal as possible; in doing so he also trivialized the experiences of both Lynch and her rescuers.

Eric Boehlert at Salon was guilty of similar BS, incidentally.

There’s a very good chance some people here still believe that, which is simply evidence that Scheer knows it doesn’t matter when he lies, given the gullibility of his fans.

The most that can be said actually happened is that some PR flacks exaggerated Lynch’s heroic fighting before her capture, based on a misidentification (her follow captured or killed soldiers did fight like the stories said; she didn’t because her gun jammed); and the same flacks may have mistrated that there was fighting at the hopsital when there was none.

But the rescue was genuine, in that it was undertaken in genuinely risky conditions, the rescuers had no idea who these doctors were at the hospital, and the area was still a combat zone.

Whatever exaggerations or mistakes in the coverage, they were quickly corrected, the White House made no attampt to get in the way of the corrections, and there is and has been absolutely no evidence that the White House had anything to do with any of it.

Scheer lied about the extent of fhe mistakes/exaggerations, when the story of what really happened was already out, and lied about White House involvement in any of it when there was and has never been any evidence of their inolvement in the episode.

Reg, your selective quotes of McCarthy are absurd. You pick the quotes that can make him sound like a hateful hothead while ignoring the arguments leading up to them, arguments that lead to the emotion he feels, which is based on: the whole situation and dilemma has to do with the fact that captured al Q members proved very quickly to be immune to our previous interrogation techniques, so what kind of increased pressure is advisable or morally permissible if any? It’s a dilemma. All he’s insisting on is that we admit there’s a dilemma in the context of admitting that the stakes me in fact be incredibly high. The Democrats want to ignore that.

Leftists tend to like ignoring the moral dilemmas so they can identify themselves with what seems to be uncomplicted moral high ground.

Mark, I know the arguments you should be making better than you do. Would you be interested in private lessons?

January 21st, 2006 at 9:05 am

—————————

Angry? I’m smirking as I write my ravings.

Do I have to have smiley faces at the end of every sentence?

;} (happy?)

“…if Senator John McCain has his way, the most urgently needed intelligence will be lost.

McCain has attached an amendment to next year’s defense appropriations bill. It is two parts grandstanding and one part suicide…”

Yeah, Andrew…go get ‘em with that refined rhetoric and high-minded discourse.

When I start posting comments from the denizens of Free Republic in order to prove how foolish the “core of the base” on the other side is, tell me I’m slipping. Meanwhile, I can pull stuff out of the mouths of their major pundits – Fred Barnes is looking particularly stupid right now with his fellatial new book on Bush (maybe since it’s “Bush” it’s cunnilingual…not sure about that…other than that it’s a bad joke) – in order to prove how foolish the GOPers are.

And I’ve said it before, so I’ll say it again. The people at NRO’s Corner are mental midgets and supremely dishonest in comparison to Josh Marshall. (Josh Marshall rose head and shoulders above those clowns and the level of their arguments the day he put Larry Diamond on line to discuss his book on the criminal negligence that has characterized the Iraq occupation. And The Washington Monthly in general and Drum in particulary totally mine the best arguments and premises of the GOP in their articles and discourse. To argue that they don’t do AT LEAST as good a job of this as fucking National Review is, again, horseshit and I think you know it.) Also the stuff you wrote above – and I’m referencing it from memory, so I won’t get specific – about how the right-wing was concerned about Abramoff before it became a public issue may be true in some self-serving, nervous-about-exposure sort of way – but the fact of the matter is that as soon as the Delay indictments first hit, the knee-jerk reaction was to defend him against an “over-reaching, partisan, Democratic prosecutor”. I’m sure you can find some quotes from a David Brooks column to counter this, but it wouldn’t be an honest assessment of “the core of the base”. I think you are full of it. You can take that personally, if you need to, but since I don’t know you personally, it’s really all about arguments that don’t wash on their face and strike me as some combo of dishonest and/or ignorance (willful or otherwise). Which, of course, is sad.

Put up or shut up. Prove it.

This is an false analogy fallacy: a rhetorical “either or” not based in fact. In short the characterization is false, and the user is a liar.

Dems are made for the Republican failing to get bin Laden. Instead running off to get a sure thing: the sitting duck Saddam. Well we got him which was easily predicted. The country is still up for grabs. And bin Laden still at large. Try reality over cheap rhetoric and go back to logic school.

Logic 101

I’m not sure what Poll you’re talking about – the Kos poll? I’ve already said it wasn’t dipositive of anything.

I’m not sure it’s true the Republicans almost universally refued to back Clinton oon the Balkans; I’m very not a lot of Repblicans called Clinton teh world’s worst terrorist. Any non-backing, I’m pretty sure, was based on teh wisdom of doing it.

As I’ve said, yes, W is at least partly to blame for the opproprium he gets. Although, it is very true that according to pols, a very large portion of the left was as incensed about Afghanistan as they are about Iraq.

Mark, you’re not really worth responding to usually. I’d just point you to your own language and ask you to consider that before saying any kidn of language proves any absesce of thoguht. I reserve teh he word “creep” for someone who lies. Scheer lies. I’m a purist on journalists who do that. Again, if you care, perhaps I’ll post a column I wrote that got printed in the Star-Trib that analyzes an example.

“The fact is the best arguments are pathetic on the right. ”

That sentence comes pretty close to proving every point I make here about lack of thought on the left.

“Convince me with substance they are not.”

The Lord helps those who help themselves.

Re: “… but I don’t understand how any American can spend more energy and ingenuity hating Republicans than Islamist terrorists.”

Bush had near universal support on this issue and threw much of it away (some would have dissipated as a matter of course). The Kos poll Paul cites is not dispositive and I believe both you and Paul know it. It has more to do with Reg’s comments on his high school teacher (whom he hated more than Kruschev) than with a substantive reflection of Democratic opinion on OBL and Islamic terrorism.

If you’d substituted Clinton for Bush and given the poll to Republicans the results would probably be similar; if you’d done this in the 90′s when OBL was already a known menace and Clinton the symbol of cosmic evil the results might have been identical to the Kos poll (or worse). I would have argued from those results that the Repiblicans were demented when it came to Clinton, not that they were soft on terrorism.

Remember that the Republicans refused almost uniformly to back Clinton on the Balkans. Don’t be so sure that they would have behaved honorably had a Dem been in the White House on 9/11. A truly honorable and effective president could have muted some of the post-9/11 partisan schadenfreude. Not all of it, but some.

Bush didn’t try hard enough to make that happen.

Plenty to criticize there, and yes, plenty to get angry about, but I don’t understand how any American can spend more energy and ingenuity hating Republicans than Islamist terrorists.

Its impossible to hold a party together when parts of the party, however critically, call for an American victory, while another part premises their position on an American defeat, while yet a third part is openly sympathetic to Baathist dead-enders and Islamists. You Lefties should really think about kicking this last element out of your supposedly Big, Tolerant, Liberal, Nuanced, Better-educated Tent.

I have had my say, for which I thank you. Let the ad hominem begin!

I can imagine the Dems

“in fact they don’t usually forthrightly adress the actual best arguments coming from the right”

In fact they always do. The fact is the best arguments are pathetic on the right. Convince me with substance they are not.

From what I’ve read of TPM Cafe and that kdin of thing, and I read Josh’s site every day and argue with him quite a bit directly, and yes they’re not bad, but no in fact they don’t usually forthrightly adress the actual best arguments coming from the right. They adopt a rational tone but consistently argue out of soem pretty serious level of ignorance (willful or otherwise) of those opinions. It’s just what i think.

Sicen you evidently don;t bring any greater level of knowledge of those opinions than they do, you may not be able to pick up on it.

Have you read Andrew McCarthy super-carefully,reg, going back day after day like I do to Josh marshall? Do you uderstand what he things abotu Hussein and al Qaeda, and are yo able to give a dry, substantial refutation of those beliefs? I, um, doubt it.

Go to hell on teh script memorized thing, reg. Apparent’y I cross an unforgivable line when i say somethign you strongly disagree with.

I will perhaps someday post a column I wrote about Scheer – about hs Jessica Lynch coverage – that backs up my ideas about that creep.