House of Eratosthenes

When I was a little boy, I asked questions about Republicans and Democrats the way little boys ask questions about anything: I’d listen to the first twenty words or so of the answer, and then get fascinated in something else. I think the answers the adults were trying to give me, had something to do with “Republicans and Democrats both have the same goals in mind but they have different ways of going about achieving it.” Adulthood taught me something contrary to this, and then it taught me something contrary to it again, and again, and again, and again.

I think a young man coming of age would be much better served with the answer, “Republicans and Democrats view life and think about what they see in fundamentally different ways.” The Dime People (“not a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties!”) vehemently protest this. But honestly, this myth about “same goals” doesn’t hold up very well. If I got a list started about these “same goals” I would have a tough time adding much into it, even across months or years. The truism that they think differently, on the other hand, seems to get proven with more and more certainty with each news event that comes along.

One of the defining differences between the two ways of thinking, is that Democrats frequently get confused between “Failing to Prove A” and “Successfully Proving !A” — when the former happens, they are frequently caught confusing it with the latter. The Weapons of Mass Destruction issue with Iraq is a perfect example of this. The successful proof of Not-A, most of us would agree, could be the only possible justification for some of the changes in policy upon which many of them insist: pulling out of Iraq, and impeaching the President for lying, are two things that come to mind. The Americans we call “mainstream” and “middle-of-the-road” would have a tough time supporting those things, knowing that a significant element of doubt exists. So, perhaps out of wishful thinking, the Democrat hierarchy simply forgets about the existing element of doubt. Yet when discussing a country the size of California, ankle- or knee-deep in sand the consistency of baby powder in which freakin’ jet fighters are known to have been hidden, only a buffoon would insist it is “proven” this area is clean of anything at all.

A second example comes to mind with former Ambassador Joe Wilson’s trip to Africa to figure out if Saddam Hussein was trying to acquire uranium from there. This is at the heart of what we call the “Plame Affair,” or the “Karl Rove Scandal”. To sum it up, at the conclusion of Wilson’s trip, he decided Iraq was not trying to acquire this uranium, based on…at this late date, I’m not sure what. My media won’t ask tough questions here. When the Senate subcommittee caught Joe Wilson red-handed, reporting things he couldn’t back up, he chalked it up to “a little literary flair.”

On at least two occasions [Wilson] admitted that he had no direct knowledge to support some of his claims and that he was drawing on either unrelated past experiences or no information at all.

For example, when asked how he “knew” that the Intelligence Community had rejected the possibility of a Niger-Iraq uranium deal, as he wrote in his book, he told Committee staff that his assertion may have involved “a little literary flair.”

This is that whole thing about “Bush Lied,” remember that? The President is supposed to have lied in his 2003 State of the Union address when he said:

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

And sadly, we have a lot of Democrats running around offering opinions about lies, who would not be able to correctly diagram that sentence and tell you what it would take to refute it. Here’s a hint: The first five words are “The British government has learned” and the subject of the sentence is “British government.”

What does the British government have to say today? Much of the hubbub surrounds a document that is supposed to have backed up the President’s statement, which has since proven to be forged. Normal, dispassionate people would then say, refutation of the statement about uranium in Africa, would depend on the forged document being the sole-source of the claim. But Democrats don’t believe in that. A forgery means a failure to prove A, and that is equal to successfully proving Not-A. But the British government, which had a pivotal role in that whole issue, sides with the normal, dispassionate people:

Nuclear watchdog the International Atomic Energy Agency, had subsequently said some documents supporting the uranium claim were forgeries.

But Lord Butler said the government had intelligence from “several different sources”.

“The forged documents were not available to the British government at the time its assessment was made and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine it,” the report said.

To call President Bush a liar without taking this into account, is pure ignorance. To take this into account and persist in calling Bush a liar, based on the uranium claim, is to engage in a serious logical fallacy. Either way, it’s not the kind of thinking in which sensible people entrust the national security.

If your wife suspects there is a wasp’s nest underneath the swing set your kids play on, you are probably going to engage in a certain style of thinking regardless of which political party you claim as yours. Democrats seem to be opposed to carrying that rational style of thinking, sterilized of tempting logical errors by the scorching heat of imminent personal danger, into public policy. If you look at the available facts, and think with the clear-headed kind of thinking you use when something really important to you is depending on you, you have to conclude that we haven’t caught President Bush in a lie just yet.

But you can’t say the same for Joseph Wilson.

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Failing to Prove AThursday, July 14th, 2005

Failing to Prove A
Thursday, July 14th, 2005