House of Eratosthenes

Predictably, Neil Young’s new song about impeaching the President has gotten a lot of tighty-righties and lefty-loosies arguing. Predictably, I have deigned to wade into the fray. Predictably, the lefty-loosies thought very little of my free advice about how to reach perhaps millions of people like me, and bolster their little message that the desire to impeach President Bush is common-sense and bipartisan. Predictably, since so little amicable reception awaited a suggestion that involves so little effort, I’m now casting a jaundiced eye toward that message — show me someone who wants to impeach, and I’ll show you a left-wing, new-age hippy.

Impeachment is packaging, not a product. Scratch that…it’s more like a hot new financing program through which the product can be sold, more conventional vehicles being unavailable to consummate the sale. The product is the same ol’ giant-sized toothpaste tube of baby-killing, soldier-slandering, quasi-socialist, mediocrity-promoting progressive-taxing mish-mash of liberal goodness.

Here is something that could not have been predicted.

Watching how liberals go about arguing over the “innernets,” and taking note of how conservatives present their arguments — noticing over and over again a subtle discrepancy between the two, a discrepancy I’ve been repeatedly told exists only in my mind — I’m given cause to think about something John Kerry said during the debates eighteen months ago. It’s a tying up of a loose-end. I knew, clear back then, that the Senator was saying something with profound implications, upon which I would have to cogitate to find the deeper meaning. I think I just got it. I’ll explain.

To explore this, think about American politics over the long term for just a second. Our population is always split over politics; that is the nature of politics. There is a cyclical nature to how clean of a split we have. There are periods of time in which the split is extremely messy, and on those occasions it is common for a third-party to emerge victorious or else give victory away to a better-established, usually-hostile faction that would otherwise suffer defeat. Three-way presidential elections typically conclude such an era, as they did in 1912 and 1992. You could say the period from 1948 to 1964 was another such time, as during this time both Republicans and Democrats were suffering from infighting among party loyalists and dissidents.

There are other times when the split is clean. This usually follows in the wake of an extraordinarily strong presidential administration. We had this “luxury,” if you want to call it that, in the 1830’s after Andrew Jackson re-defined what a Jacksonian Democrat was. A hundred years later, you were either with FDR’s New Deal, or you weren’t. Presidents Reagan and Clinton similarly polarized the landscape. A President can be strong, and fail, at the same time. Lyndon Johnson was extroardinarily effective at getting his policies passed. He was popular in 1964, and unpopular in 1969. Cleaning up the mish-mash, helping friend & foe to decide whether to support him or oppose him, he was successful all the way through. I do not know of anyone, nor do I know of anyone who knows anyone, who was undecided about LBJ.

By the way, let me take just a step or two down a tiny bunny trail. There’s a secondary pattern here. Feelings of resentment toward a presidential administration by a chunk of the contemporary electorate, no matter how bitter and unforgettable the feeling, and no matter how big the chunk, do very little to cast dispersions on an administration through history’s lens. “Strong” presidents, almost by definition, have ticked people off. Presidents who made “everybody” happy were weak, and history regards them as such. Bush-bashers forever bellyaching about “disunity,” I’m lookin’ right at you. You say history will frame our current President as weak, because his policies have made a lot of people upset. You’re saying history will do what it never has done, and never can do. Abraham Lincoln is a far more likely model: Rancor toward Lincoln was buried with the bones of those who had borne it, while the memory of his strength endures for generation after generation, with no end in sight. There’s your foreshadowing of Bush’s legacy.

Back to the subject at hand. The nature of the split is what is cyclical. The public is agitated into action, each half against the other, or else the public is generally dissatisfied in a way it can’t quite define. If dissatisfaction is the order of the day, the clean split is lost; voter participation tumbles, infighting ensues as offshoot factions emerge, or both.

Where are we right now? Today, the President’s ability to keep his own party unified has sunk beneath the zone of the inadequate; it is indefensible. In matters of illegal immigration and the like, there is no reason — none — for the conservative wing of the Republican party to be betrayed in the way that it has. People understand that being anti-illegal-immigrant isn’t the same as being anti-immigrant, even those who try to foment this confusion for their political gain. And in matters where the administration has been friendlier to the conservative position, such as defending the decision to invade Iraq, no excuse justifies the appallingly poor job they’ve done getting their message out.

Seldom have I been more surprised over any long stretch of time, than I have been since the Spring of 2003, when I saw my very first picket sign that said “WHERE ARE THE WMDS?” about five or six weeks into the invasion. The “We Should Not Have Gone In Because There Were No WMDs” crowd has achieved something incredible here, and the credit can go nowhere except toward the administration’s thoroughly incompetent job of defending itself. There isn’t even a unifying message behind this movement; nobody, in any rational dialog, can long defend the proposition that because the search for WMDs hasn’t gone so hot, this means Saddam was a harmless guy and it would have been a great idea to leave him alone. But I can take that sentence immediately preceding, polish it up a bit, put that position in a poll, and draw an approval rating for it topping out over seventy percent. It’s done all the time.

Unbelievable.

But the split isn’t altogether unclean, for a lot of that seventy percent is crossover. Take a close look at the next poll you see. A lot of the polls that say “The People Are Now Against Our Being In Iraq” are promoted as opposition to going in in the first place, which is a dead issue — the content of said polls has to do with getting out now that we’re there. This is deception bordering on fraud. It works great, once again, because of the administration’s incompetence at getting their message out.

We have polls asking us if we approve of the direction the country’s going; negative responses are inferred to be negative comments about the administration, and by extension, scorn for the more controversial policies promoted by same.

Again, this is deception bordering on fraud. I’m a great example. I strongly disapprove of the direction in which the country is going. In my opinion, taking out Saddam Hussein was a great idea, and it came far too late. I would support congressional investigations into Bush, Clinton, and Bush’s dad exploring why it took as long as it did. Put former administration officials in front of House and Senate panels, and make ’em sweat, indict some people.

Why was the United Nations allowed to decide so much, for so long, while repeatedly failing to produce results on which so much depended? Ask the question. Take away a pension or two, put someone in leg irons.

For how many do I speak? And how many do I horrify?

The point is, in some ways, a lot of ways, our split is clean. The half of us that sees President Bush as a champion, be that half content, frustrated, or feeling itself actually betrayed on some issues, recognizes the other half as promoting dangerous and deleterious policy, and vice-versa. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if our figurehead steps up to his responsibilities to represent us, or not. We know that good is good, evil is evil, illegal aliens are dangerous, and the word “patriotism” doesn’t have a lot to do with blaming your country for every little thing that goes wrong.

We think for ourselves. That really is the difference.

Oh, how horrid and offensive that is to the loyal Bush-basher who became a liberal so he could claim to think for himself. This is where Kerry’s words come into play.

Senator Kerry spent much of the long hot summer of 2004 atoning for his ridiculous utterance, “I actually voted for the $87 billion [in emergency funding for the troops in Iraq] before I voted against it,” opting to use silence as the best salve to cleanse the gaping wound. When he met the President in Coral Gables, his staff switched ointments, and they did it cleverly. It was really a thing of beauty, and I remember admiring him for it. When President Bush brought up the quote, and bloggers on both sides knew that he would, the Senator responded:

Well, you know, when I talked about the $87 billion, I made a mistake in how I talk about the war. But the president made a mistake in invading Iraq. Which is worse?

Pow! Right in the kissa! “Kerry fans” — actually, Kerry doesn’t have any fans, they’re just people who hate President Bush — to this day insist the Senator won all three debates, and this is the kind of thing they have in mind. Victory snatched from the jaws of defeat. Lemonade from a lemon.

Except…OH, NOES. The Senator then did a bad thing. A bad, bad thing.

He did the same thing again, eight days later in St. Louis during his closing thirty seconds. I don’t know why. Maybe he was trying to be spontaneous, showing how great he is at thinking on his feet. Bush had stung him again with the same quotation, and why not use the same riposte? It was the proscribed response. That’s exactly the problem with doing it a second time…

…here’s what I’ll say about the $87 billion. I made a mistake in the way I talk about it. He made a mistake in invading Iraq. Which is a worse decision?

Here’s the problem with that, and this is how it dovetails with what passes for “arguing” when I argue with liberals.

It is wholly incompatible with individualized, creative, independent thought.

Think about it. You could, indeed, see the decision to invade Iraq as “a worse decision” than to say you voted for the $87 billion before you voted against it. Millions upon millions of people do. But John Kerry went further. He defined a razor-thin stencil of what blessed opinions people are supposed to have. He was compulsive about doing this. He couldn’t stop. He did it from the Dean Scream, to his own concession speech, and every single moment in between the two.

You could say “Sen. Kerry, I do think the decision to invade Iraq was worse than your brain-fart about the $87 billion, but I’m a stickler for things involving public speakers articulating their positions, and although what President Bush did was worse than what you said, both are emphatically unacceptable to me.” You could say that. It’s a matter of personal philosophy and taste. But you’d still be outside of Sen. Kerry’s razor-thin perimeter of what opinions you’re supposed to have.

You could go the other way, of course. You could say “Sen. Kerry, your misstatement about the $87 billion wasn’t nearly as bad as your opponent’s decision to invade Iraq, but I’m a live-and-let-live kinda guy. Presidents will come, Presidents will go, some of them will start wars I don’t like, that’s just the way it is. He was worse, but both are okay by me.” That, too, would be outside of Kerry’s razor-thin definition of what’s acceptable.

No, no, no. The Senator’s question-mark on the end, was purely cosmetic; he wasn’t asking, he was telling. Both statements were not acceptable, and both statements were not unacceptable — one was, one wasn’t, and you were to look to him to find out which was which. That’s not so bad — until you consider, that he had an equally precise tune coming out of his fiddle for you to dance to, on the next issue. And the one after that, and the one after that.

In short, he was a horrible candidate for representative public office — one of many on that side of the aisle — because he never showed the capacity for asking for support. He told lesser mortals what to think. In his world, that’s the way things are done.

No, I’m undecided on whether that is what caused his defeat. The old boy did come awfully close.

But what is described above, is the real split. I saw that this morning, after my comments on that silly impeachment song. The litmus test I was applying to the lyrics, meant nothing. The idea that others like me could be applying the same litmus test, meant nothing. It was not specifically denied, ever — it was simply rejected as anything worthy of discussion. My opponents were afraid of having their fragile little mindsets corrupted by even considering the issue.

Their method of arguing, over and over and over again, was to bring to my attention how my comments failed to find favor with them — long after I demonstrated this wasn’t a big priority to me. Okay, maybe they were simply paying back what they saw come their way. But that’s the very opposite of arguing intelligently, isn’t it?

The point is, simply by noticing things about impeachment movements, the things such movements always include, the things they almost never include, I was “violating” something and my violation was the only matter worthy of discussion. I was coloring outside of the lines. Nevermind that during an actual presidential impeachment proceeding, everybody’s opinion matters somewhat and there is no tiny secret club of elites that gets to decide everything, outside of perhaps the Senate. Nevermind that. My opinion was contraband.

I think that’s the split. I’ve discussed, before (FAQ Question #8), the critical difference between a fact, an inference, a thing-to-do, and other important pieces of the things we call “arguments.” Page through previous entries on this blog, and you’ll find perhaps dozens of references to “established facts” and “reasonable opinions derived from those facts.” The people we call “conservatives,” whether they feel good about President Bush or not, react more-or-less appropriately to these classifications, after having made them on their own. They ask things like, I may like what I’m hearing, but is that a proven thing? What is your source? Or…I don’t disagree with your assessment of what’s happening, but how does it follow that we should do what you’re saying we should do? What will that achieve?

The people we call “liberals” — as I pointed out several paragraphs ago, perhaps it would be more appropriate to call them “Bush haters” — don’t see arguments that way. They see arguments as ethereal. As so much “stuff.” They make no classification of these cognitions, except whether they like something or whether they don’t. That’s the only distinction that has an affect on how they will react.

Proof may be lacking in something they favor, or it may exist for something that earns their scorn. In those situations, I very seldom see a left-winger place much importance on the question of proof, or even the concept of proof — or of evidence that falls short of proof, or even mildly compelling support. It’s all just a red herring to the liberal.

He asks, simply, do I like what I’m hearing, or do I not? NOTHING else matters. And if a liberal dislikes what you’ve told him, and you’re waiting for an explanation of why, you’re likely to be waiting a very long time.

Yet they really, truly, do see themselves as deeper thinkers. They really do. There’s only one reason why they’re deeper thinkers: They disapprove of something that earned the approval of someone else who doesn’t think as deeply. Providing reasons why they’re such brilliant, deep thinkers, this is ALL. THEY. HAVE.

Today, it appears to be difficult to remain a liberal, without that mindset.

It also appears to be very difficult to avoid becoming one, once the mindset has been accepted.

That seems to be the “clean split” of our times. Half of us think every little remark made, with regard to anything serious, is subject to some sort of voice-vote, some enigmatic popularity contest, some previously-defined blessing by an annointed leader. And no other form of validation. The other half of us think for ourselves.

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Our Clean SplitThursday, April 27th, 2006

Our Clean Split
Thursday, April 27th, 2006