Wild and unsubstantiated accusations.

The non-scandal of Susan Rice's involvement with the Benghazi attack has been unraveling in the last days.  John McCain and Lindsey Graham have been leading the charge against Rice, claiming that she must have lied to protect the Obama administration just before the election.  As it turns out, not only was there no evidence when McCain and Graham began making these accusations; there is now evidence to the contrary--the CIA gave her certain talking points she was allowed to cover, and redacted certain others (including any mention of al Qaeda).  The Washington Post editorial board just published a column calling the GOP attacks bizarre, and pointing out why they are so bizarre.  Nevertheless, the article, which reveals the stupidity of wild, unsubstantiated accusation, ends with one of its own.

The WP editorial board may be correct, but simply indicating the skin color of a certain percentage of the signatories does not make this speculation any less wild than the bizarre GOP attacks they've just described.

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: