A terrible argument with a true conclusion.

I try to be logically consistent--which is to say that I try not to contradict myself.  Nevertheless, I am sure I do some times.  At times it is because my opinion has changed on an issue (in this sense, I am not embarrassed in the least by my contradictions, which are a sign of growth and learning).  Other times I have not fully understood an issue from all angles.  But I try not to contradict myself within the course of one and the same argument.  Jennifer Rubin, WP blogger, has an interesting article today on the problems with the primary process (at least on the GOP side).  Her conclusions (as ideas, not as conclusions) are quite interesting.

Nevertheless, good logic is not a matter of good conclusions (only), but of strong premises.  In the course of her argument, Rubin claims that the test of a GOP candidate has become to narrow:

The problem is the second half of this part of the argument:

You cannot claim both that the strainer is incredibly fine and that Romney somehow made it through.  Romney conformed to almost none of the conditions Rubin has described in the second paragraph above--he's not a life-long conservative by most standards; his position on immigration included the insane notion of "self-deportation"; he had little blue-collar appeal (47% remark did not endear him to this demographic); and he did little to wow conservatives with his rhetoric.  So, if you read her article today, just skip to the end:

Sometimes, where there's smoke there is just smoke.

President Obama won 100% of the vote in 59 precincts in Philadelphia.  This sounds an awful lot like the kind of percentage one expects in a dictatorship.  After all, isn't it statistically impossible to win by such a margin?  In a country (with a diverse population), yes.  But not in a precinct with homogeneous demographics.

(Full article).
Certain watchers cried, "foul!" regarding what appeared to be %150 voter turnout in certain parts of south Florida.  As it turns out, sometimes, where there is smoke there is just smoke.  The county simply counted each page of the ballot rather than each ballot: turnout was half of what was reported (two pages per ballot).  There may have been some serious glitches in this election, but Philly and south Florida provide no evidence of systematic fraud (yet, in any case).

Grover Norquist is a "poopy head"!

Never trust a man who is afraid to use the word shit.

Actually, that is the least of my problems with Norquist.  The real problem is that Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform and mastermind behind the Republican anti-tax pledge, is engaged in a priori politics.  There are two kinds of intellectual disciplines, theoretical (think math) and practical (think physics or biology).  The former disciplines require no experience of the physical world (if you take away all apples and oranges, two plus two still equals four).  A priori politics begins with certain definitions and axia which require no experience of the physical world--the world of people, money, businesses, exchange, war.  From the initial definitions and axia of Euclid's Elements, one can construct a dodecahedron without any need to leave his mind.  This cannot work in politics because people, money and power are not ideas.  The great thing about ideas is that they do not change, they are stable--this makes them easy to work with.  People, on the other hand, change, move, break the rules and act stupidly.  Applying inflexible axia (such as the anti-tax pledge) to humans cannot work because it is blind to the possibility of new necessities.  In other words, it suggests that there are no conditions under which taxes would need to be increased.  This is ostrich politics.

Fair and Balanced

With the election over, the losers are bound to do some Monday-morning quarterbacking.  This happens after every election, whether the country goes Red or Blue.  Indeed, the football analogy is apt--a football team takes the time to analyze a loss so as to not commit the same errors.  Unfortunately, in this era of meta-journalism (reporting about reporting and reporters, as if that were news), much of the blame is bound to be placed on the media itself, and I saw a good bit of this by the folks at Fox News (and other outlets) this morning.  To be clear, the media has a strong influence on any election, as indeed they should, since their job is to inform the voting public.  It's been said that the media contributed to Ford's loss to Carter in '76--when the public saw that Ford was up in the polls and likely to win, the public was reminded that they were unhappy with him.  However, recognizing that the media influences an election is not the same as saying that the media was responsible for the outcome of an election.  As I've already pointed out, simply noting that MSNBC reported more negatively about Romney than Fox did about Obama is absolutely void of meaning until content is offered (that is, quantity is meaningless without quality).  This is where fair and balanced comes in.  Often the public assumes that fair and balanced means that for each negative story reported about Romney, the same network must report a negative story about Obama.  This, of course, requires a news network to make up news on occasion just so as to fulfill this false sense of balance.  In other words, in order to do their job, journalists are forced to abandon journalistic integrity.  Scott Whitlock complained that MSNBC mocked Romney's international gaffes while fawning over Obama's world tour.  Fox News' Rich Noyes presented "Five Ways the Mainstream Media Tipped the Scales for Obama".  As I see it, there are two ways to react to these claims (not to say accusations).  First, you can deny.  This is the simplest reaction, and the one which will be chosen by most, I suspect.  Second, you can admit that this is precisely correct.  MSNBC especially took Romney to task, and much more often and much more harshly than they did Obama (and more than Fox did Obama).  This is because Romney said some of the dumbest things imaginable during this campaign (the Putin comment), contradicted himself over and over, and chose a terrible running mate (only Palin could have been worse).  Obama certainly made his own mistakes on the trail, but were I to recount them now, I'd be falling into the trap of that false notion of fair and balanced I noted above.  The articles by Whitlock and Noyes are intended to show that certain media outlets are not fair nor balanced, implying that they are not doing their jobs.  Instead, with their lists and descriptions of the Romney campaign's errors and misjudgments, they are really making that case the the media outlets they have in mind have done their job quite well.  In effect, they are asking, "why should Romney be taken to task for a mistake someone else... noticed.  Maybe Romney should call Bob Loblaw.