"WaPo's @JRubinBlogger kicks DeMint on way out"

The mixed metaphor notwithstanding (kicking you when you are down + letting the door hit you in the ass on the way out), Byron York's tweet was misleading.  It makes it sound as if DeMint lost his seat or was fired.  In fact, he's moving on to a better paying job at the Heritage Foundation.  Regardless of what you think of DeMint or or the Heritage Foundation, Rubin's blog post was intelligent and spelled out the ways that DeMint has failed to serve conservatives (in Rubin's opinion).  I can imagine some dissent from Rubin's position, but such should be accompanied by facts, arguments, something.  Instead, Mark Levin simply told her to go to hell.

 

Michelle Malkin, on the other hand, resorted to punctuation.  Instead of showing how Rubin is not a true conservative, she used scare quotes to make sure that we know that Malkin does not consider her far right enough.  Too bad, this could have been an interesting conversation.

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: