House of Eratosthenes

I have a tough time remembering the name of the publication for which columnist Maureen Dowd works — my memory key is that it is the paper known for hiring Jayson Blair to make stuff up and report it is “news”. Once again donning her robes of the High Priestess of Correct Opinions, Dowd preaches to us and instructs us on what we’re supposed to think about Cindy Sheehan, mother of Iraq casualty Casey Sheehan, and the meeting desired by the bereaved mother with President Bush.

I don’t blame people for reading Dowd, but it surprises me that anyone can read her columns ostensibly for the purpose of becoming more informed about a given situation, forming a more definite opinion based on things they have learned be true, or gathering a helpful tidbit or two they can pass on to someone else. She has the same problem as that old fossil Krugmasaurus, who works at some paper that…oh, my mistake, it’s the same one. Hmmm.

There are facts, there are opinions based on those facts, there are value-judgments, logical inferences, calls for action, calls for inaction. There is humor. Which is which? Maureen Dowd, herself, appears not to know. If she doesn’t understand the purpose of a given paragraph or sentence, why should her readers? And if we don’t know & can’t find out, why are we reading?

It’s hard to think of another president who lived in such meta-insulation. His rigidly controlled environment allows no chance encounters with anyone who disagrees. He never has to defend himself to anyone, and that is cognitively injurious. He’s a populist who never meets people – an ordinary guy who clears brush, and brush is the only thing he talks to.

It’s hard to think of another president who lived in such meta-insulation. His rigidly controlled environment allows no chance encounters with anyone who disagrees. These two sentences appear to be describing hard fact. So what exactly is it: Something known to be true, or a theory concocted to explain something previously observed? Does Maureen Dowd follow President Bush around all day, and monitor anyone & everyone with whom he comes in contact? Or does she know someone who does this? It seems unlikely. So if it isn’t the recitation of a fact, could it be…humor? How am I supposed to be using this, Ms. Dowd? It’s part of your product; if I don’t know the answer, you certainly should. If you know, please tell me, or at least give me a clue.

He never has to defend himself to anyone, and that is cognitively injurious. Half of this sentence is the recitation of a fact, or the recitation of a supposed fact, which again seems difficult to assert; the other half is a statement of logical progression that seems at least somewhat reasonable. Trouble is, the U.S. Constitution requires the President to defend himself to Congress during a whole variety of events, so at least a part of this is provably false. If you really want to force the President to defend himself, you elect a hostile Congress; our electorate didn’t feel like doing that, so perhaps by doing the next-best-thing — writing about it, when you can’t get your agenda passed at the ballot box — what Dowd is doing here is telling us once again what a bunch of stupid dolts we are.

He’s a populist who never meets people – an ordinary guy who clears brush, and brush is the only thing he talks to. Okay, now this must be a joke. Jokes are fine, but again, how much of this column is a joke? Just this sentence, or the entire thing? How am I supposed to be using your product Maureen?

You know, if I didn’t know better I’d swear this was just an exercise in literary masturbation; pointless, feel-good stuff designed to make me feel satisfied if I shared the same prejudices as Maureen Dowd, which unfortunately, I don’t. That’s a little disturbing, because if the facts were on the side of your prejudices, you wouldn’t need to stroke-off your audience to keep them agreeing with you. You could simply let them go about their lives, offering concrete, provable facts, and the opinions based on reasonable inferences derived from those facts. Completely and deliberately losing track of the barrier between those inferences, and humor, would be an unnecessary exercise.

The Bush team tried to discredit “Mom” by pointing reporters to an old article in which she sounded kinder to W.

It’s kind of sad in a telling way, that for those who wish to defeat Maureen Dowd intellectually can do so most effectively by simply researching what she reports. It turns out if you take the time to find out what she’s talking about, not only is Dowd’s point discredited, but Cindy Sheehan’s campaign doesn’t look too hot either. Furthermore, it doesn’t appear “The Bush team” had much to do with reporting this unless you count Drudge as being part of the Bush team.

It’s looking kind of bad. Cindy Sheehan has already met with George W. Bush. I’m taking it as a given that some people have lost children in Iraq, perhaps more than one, and have yet to meet with the President once. So that poses a problem; there are many things to suggest that the purpose of this second meeting is to make the President look bad, and that’s a second problem.

The third problem? Well Ms. Sheehan’s inconsistencies are just downright disturbing. Here’s what she said following the meeting last year, in the third month after her son unfortunately became a casualty.

“I now know he’s sincere about wanting freedom for the Iraqis…I know he’s sorry and feels some pain for our loss. And I know he’s a man of faith.”

For a moment, life returned to the way it was before Casey died. They laughed, joked and bickered playfully as they briefly toured Seattle.

For the first time in 11 weeks, they felt whole again.

“That was the gift the president gave us, the gift of happiness, of being together.”

It’s kind of bad when the flavor of a story as reported by an editorialist, goes a hundred-and-eighty degrees against the flavor the story has when you just look into things yourself and find out what’s really going on. Maureen Dowd doesn’t want to tell us what’s going on, she just wants to tell us what to think.

It gets worse. Second-to-last paragraph, Dowd dutifully advises us that

Selectively humane, Bush justified his Iraq war by stressing the 9/11 losses. He emphasized the humanity of the Iraqis who desire freedom when his weapons of mass destruction rationale vaporized.

And that’s provably false. Links to Colin Powell’s address to the United Nations Security Council before the invasion of Iraq, are vanishing from the Internet like milk duds before Rosie O’Donnell. But the State Department has kept a copy online, in which the rationale is concluded with the following:

And, friends, this has been a long and a detailed presentation and I thank you for your patience, but there is one more subject that I would like to touch on briefly, and it should be a subject of deep and continuing concern to this Council: Saddam Hussein’s violations of human rights.

Underlying all that I have said, underlying all the facts and the patterns of behavior that I have identified, is Saddam Hussein’s contempt for the will of this Council, his contempt for the truth, and, most damning of all, his utter contempt for human life. Saddam Hussein’s use of mustard and nerve gas against the Kurds in 1988 was one of the 20th century’s most horrible atrocities. Five thousand men, women and children died. His campaign against the Kurds from 1987 to ’89 included mass summary executions, disappearances, arbitrary jailing and ethnic cleansing, and the destruction of some 2,000 villages.

He has also conducted ethnic cleansing against the Shia Iraqis and the Marsh Arabs whose culture has flourished for more than a millennium. Saddam Hussein’s police state ruthlessly eliminates anyone who dares to dissent. Iraq has more forced disappearance cases than any other country — tens of thousands of people reported missing in the past decade.

Nothing points more clearly to Saddam Hussein’s dangerous intentions and the threat he poses to all of us than his calculated cruelty to his own citizens and to his neighbors. Clearly, Saddam Hussein and his regime will stop at nothing until something stops him.

So whoops, we did it again. You go check out the material upon which the Dowd opinion is based, and you find the Dowd opinion is utterly unsustainable. Dowd is either ignorant, or else instructing us on what to think with the express wish that we should not take the time to find out what she’s talking about. Either way, it’s difficult to use the product she’s provided in a progressive way; the facts upon which it is based, are provably false. In this case, nobody invented an ulterior motive of human rights when the WMD justification “vaporized,” the humanitarian intentions were there from Day One. That’s just the way it is.

I find it interesting that Colin Powell, and the Bush Administration, have been subsequently embarrassed by this testimony. They were put in that position because Secretary Powell structured his presentation soundly: Things we know, things we conclude from what we know, things we think we must do based on the things we have concluded. Each and every little statement falls neatly within one category — not two or more — and there is no subject change via the insertion of inappropriate jocularity.

Because of that, Secretary Powell’s logic was crystal clear to anyone who bothered to pay attention, and thus left open to assault. Ultimately, the court of public opinion held the administration accountable. That, it would appear, is a little bit too much heat for the Dowd kitchen. She can’t tell me, or won’t tell me, why she thinks my President talks to brush all day.

I’m glad that our elected representatives were held to account for the things they thought they knew but didn’t really quite know. But does this do us any good, if the journalists who work for our nation’s supposed “Paper of Record” are not held to the same standard?

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How To Defeat a DowdThursday, August 11th, 2005

How To Defeat a Dowd
Thursday, August 11th, 2005