House of Eratosthenes

[Commission on Presidential Debates co-chairman Frank] Fahrenkopf said he was proud of his role in helping to pick the debate moderators, but then added, shockingly I thought: “We made one mistake this time: Her name is Candy,” a reference to Candy Crowley of CNN, who absorbed hosannas from the left and brickbats from the right after she corrected Mitt Romney during the second debate.

Ed Morrissey provides video of Candy Crowley’s mea culpa. This is right after the debate ended:

And for those who don’t recall, here’s Ms. Crowley getting bored with her role as moderator, and deciding to jump in to a side gig of fact checker; just like Star Trek actors going cowboy or gangster or Robin Hood or something.

“Could you say that a little louder, Candy?”

So let’s recap. Candy Crowley says Mitt Romney was right “in the main.” So okay…let’s take all the partisan passion out of this by calling that Fact A. So we don’t get all hung up on the deceptive details, like “Yeah but President Obama actually used the word such-and-such” — just say, since Crowley was forced to change her tune on this, that Mitt Romney was right about something. So we can concentrate on how this verified fact was treated.

Fact A did occur.

In the weeks afterward, the administration repeatedly insisted: Not A. Ambassador Rice appeared on talk show after talk show insisting: Not A. Then, eventually, it became undeniable: A.

Crowley’s name was put up, and then chosen, as the debate moderator. Which is pretty good evidence that there are no Republicans on the commission, or if there are, they must have a collective case of laryngitis. Or are comatose.

During the debate, Gov. Romney said: A, and yet the administration has insisted, Not A.

President Obama insisted: We never said, not Fact A. Gov. Romney replied, in the video you see above, WTF?? Did I get that right? President Obama said, in the Rose Garden on the morning after, I said, A.

Candy Crowley, in her role as moderator, jumped in and said: He’s right! He said A.

Then, in the after-briefing, Crowley fest up that Gov. Romney was “right, in the main.” The administration’s position had been Not-A. When the truth is, A.

And then, we were told what a wonderful thing it was to have Candy Crowley moderating that debate with her wonderful debate-moderation skills, even if she did flub up that one thing and generate needless controversy. By not moderating, but doing something else. Inappropriately, and wrongly.

Now we find out what was always plain to see: Candy Crowley didn’t do a good job. She didn’t even do the job. She did a different job. So, we were misled about A versus Not-A, what the administration had to say about it, about Candy Crowley being a debate moderator, and about Candy Crowley being good at her job. In short, the prevailing-wisdom about this whole thing has been 180 degrees off course, from the very beginning. The loudest voices speaking have been constantly spewing nonsense.

This is a ritual we repeat every four years, so it is good to see there is so much room to improve next time. Certainly can’t move far in the other direction.

There was an article in the NYT yesterday about how to improve the debate experience, the usual call for smarter questions. Then the commenters jumped into give suggestions about how to force the candidates to face the issues. They overwhelmingly wanted to complain that the Republicans refuse to face facts. There was barely a whiff of any awareness of how hard the moderators tried to favor the Democrats. If moderators attack Democrats, they do it from the left.
- Texan99 | 02/21/2013 @ 06:27
A contradiction cannot exist in nature. Like Prof. Hugh Axton said, channeling Aristotle, if you think you see one then check your premises, you’ll find out one of them is wrong.

We’ve had a certain character logging on here under an ID that begins with the letter Z, making much of “experimentation” in science. In fact, while experimentation has a lot to do with the micro-discoveries, this “check your premises” thing is largely responsible for the macro. This is how we find out stars are such-and-such a distance away. This is how Eratosthenes figured out the size of the Earth. An apparent contradiction was defined, and since a genuine contradiction is impossible, we have a dilemma. First step to learning something is admitting you don’t know whatever it is.

And now we come to the problem of the debates. In their current form they are going to be hostile to the conservative point of view, because they will not accept an answer consisting of “but, I don’t accept your premise,” and they will not tolerate any debate about the premises. And so all the silly things, once uttered and found to be cool-sounding, stay embedded in the discussion. We have to spend lots of money to keep from going broke, Obama said Benghazi was a terrorist attack the very next day, He took out bin Laden, ObamaCare will cure our deficit and global warming is a national security problem.
- mkfreeberg | 02/21/2013 @ 06:57
Currently hoping the Crowley debacle is the first step in a healing process. It is a very, very remote hope but I do have it.

I do think Americans have a genuine hope that these debates will give them the information they need, and they can rely on it. That obviously is not going to happen if they’re constant circuses of silliness, like we see this silly thing was from four months ago now that we have all the information. Americans are right to be concerned.
- mkfreeberg | 02/21/2013 @ 07:00
I dunno, y’all. Maybe I’m just morose this morning (havent’ had my coffee yet), but I’m pretty sure we’re fucked.

Anecdotes aren’t data, I realize, but based on many, many ancedotes from years of association with the education racket, I don’t think many folks under about 35 or so are even capable of understanding the fact / value distinction. A 20-year marination in leftist groupthink, K through BA, has atrophied whatever critical faculties they once had.

For instance:

George W. Bush was president of the United States.

That’s a fact. It’s indisputable. It’s in history books. You can look it up.

George W. Bush was a bad president.

That’s an opinion. It begs the question, because “bad” is an evaluative word. On what metrics? Compared to whom?

Our kiddoes don’t understand that. If you ask ’em if Bush was a bad president, they reply, “duh!” But if you ask them to expound on that, the best you get is something vague about Guantanamo this, WMD that. If you ask them what those are, though….

It’s not simple ignorance. With rational thinkers, you can lay facts on ’em, and even if they don’t fully come around, anyone who is at all intellectually honest will admit, at least, that the issue is considerably more complicated than they’d supposed. Not these folks, though. All that stuff is bad bad bad, just because. They’re the same people who seem to understand the Colbert Code — The Daily Show is, simultaneously, straight-up news, satire, and trenchant social criticism. If you agree, you’re an “informed viewer,” much smarter than those blockheads who watch Faux. If you disagree, c’mon dude, it’s just a joke, lighten up. Except that, you know, the joke is 100% true, and can be cited, sans “lighten up dude,” as the winning point in an internet debate.

Five minutes of kids talking about The Daily Show makes me long for a bottle of horse tranquilizers. But they’re quite comfortable with it, because nobody ever bothered to teach them that “facts” and “opinions” are two very different things.

Hence, we’re fucked.
- Severian | 02/21/2013 @ 07:23
Agree on all except the last two words.

Maybe my position comes from a faith process and not a rational/science process…but I keep thinking, if this is an inevitability, why then does it not apply to everybody? Why are there people who are not part of Thing I Know #330:

A man who doesn’t know the difference between a fact and an opinion, is not to be trusted in delivering either one of those.

And it seems to me to be a situation of necessity. Confronted with a problem that can only be resolved by means of properly distinguishing between fact and opinion, you’ll have an incentive to develop this life-skill; naturally, if not so confronted, then you won’t.

We seem to have lots of kids walking around who’ve never been confronted by this.
- mkfreeberg | 02/21/2013 @ 07:29
As the well-meaning professor put it in the NYT piece, evidently meaning to be all moderate and even-handed-sounding, we should ask the candidates whether tax cuts for the rich or investing in infrastructure will be most likely to bring about prosperity. He didn’t even know what was wrong with his premises, nor did most of his audience.
- Texan99 | 02/21/2013 @ 07:57
Texan99,

yeah, that’s exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about. The lib position is taken as the default good, the conservative as the default evil, even when both are opinions. The answer to that question could be one, the other, both, or neither, depending on circumstances. But since every goodthinkful person knows that tax cuts are bad and infrastructure is good…..

And these are the teachers. The smart ones, with PhDs and everything, as they’ll surely tell you at Tolstoyvian length if you ask them (and even if you don’t). The ones who control the grade book. You can only say to yourself “ok, I’ll say ‘tax cuts are bad’ if it makes the teacher happy” for so long before you start to subconsciously think that they are bad, never once realizing that “bad” is an evaluative word.

When I’m dictator, we dismantle the entire American educational system, salt the earth where the Dept. of Ed once stood, and make the very suggestion of a teachers’ union punishable by catapult. America will be back on its feet in no time.
- Severian | 02/21/2013 @ 08:03
PS, but as for whether we’re fucked, I’m not so sure. Yes, I’m strongly inclined to be sardonic and pessimistic, but you don’t have to go back very many years to find an equally disquieting political and cultural picture. We got out of some scrapes that must have seemed pretty impossible for our forebears. I think it’s important to keep slugging away.

Here’s a cheerful story. I walk every morning with my next-door neighbor, a wild-eyed liberal in many ways, certainly compared to me. I knew her husband was slightly more conservative, especially about gun control. They had been watching a local education TV show about gun control and recommended it to us as fair. We were polite but skeptical. Then this morning, my neighbor pops out with the information that her husband has asked her to consider getting her concealed-carry license and carrying everywhere, so that if there’s a shoot-up, she can be part of the solution. She’s a little taken aback, but thinking about it seriously enough to ask where I stand on the subject. She’s at least going to start accompanying some local friends to their periodic target practice.

I’ve just about given up trying to talk to her about AGW or teachers’ unions, though. Baby steps.
- Texan99 | 02/21/2013 @ 08:06
Ugh. That phrase.
- mkfreeberg | 02/21/2013 @ 08:25

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