House of Eratosthenes

Over in Ed Morissey’s corner at HotAir, he points to Anchoress, who notes something interesting about Scott McClellan’s testimony regarding the +++rolls eyes+++ Plame “scandal”:

Well, I’m sure Congress feels like they accomplished something today with their interrogation of former White House press secretary Scott McClellan. After making a series of inflated allegations in his memoirs, What Happened, he told Congress that he really doesn’t know what happened — at least not in l’affaire Plame. When asked whether President George Bush knew about any effort to leak Valerie Plame’s identity to the press, he said Bush didn’t know about it — and McClellan doesn’t know anything about anybody else’s efforts, either:

U.S. President George W. Bush did not know about a White House effort to leak the identity of a CIA agent but tried to protect staffers who were involved in one of the biggest scandals of his administration, former Bush spokesman Scott McClellan told Congress on Friday.

McClellan said he did not think Bush was involved in a 2003 effort to blow the cover of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, whose husband had accused the administration of twisting intelligence to justify the Iraq war. …

Vice President Dick Cheney’s involvement in the leak might have been greater, McClellan said.

“I do not think the president in any way had knowledge about it,” McClellan told lawmakers. “In terms of the vice president, I do not know. There is a lot of suspicion there.”

McClellan said that Bush ordered him to tell the press that Karl Rove and Scooter Libby didn’t have anything to do with the leaks, through the chief of staff at the White House. However, that might be because Bush believed that they didn’t. If Bush didn’t know about the supposed effort to leak Plame’s identity, then it stands to reason that he believed the assurances of both men that they didn’t have anything to do with it. And since neither of them had talked with Robert Novak, in whose column the leak occurred, that may well have been the case — at least as far as Bush was concerned.

Anchoress opines further at Pajamas Media. This is why I like Anchoress — the subject to be explored, is what immediately popped into my head when reading Mr. McClellan’s “testimony,” indeed pops in there just about any time I’m reacquainted with my disgust over this Plame thing: Critical thinking, and the desperate fit of thrashing around it’s doing lately on its deathbed.

“Yeah, it is that simple. He lied, and we all know it. So STFU. Now.” — Marecek

That was one of 1,643 comments left in response to Fred Hiatt’s June 9 piece in the Washington Post, entitled “Bush Lied? If Only It Were That Simple,” which covered the findings of the Select Committee on Intelligence, headed by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV (D-WV).

Marecek’s was the majority opinion.

In writing his piece for the editorial page of the Washington Post, Hiatt — that page’s editor — made the mistake of actually quoting passages of this report, which claimed that a host of “lies” of which President Bush has been accused since 2003 were “substantiated by intelligence.”

Vituperation and ad hominem attacks were left as commentary at the paper’s website, with calls for Hiatt’s immediate firing, for — apparently — his treason in quoting a report, written by a Democratic majority, that dared to depart from a narrative that has become conventional wisdom.

You know? The more I think about this lying idiot that edits WaPo, the more I realize how venal and corrupt the neo-cons really are. They really have no shame. No shame at all. Their corruption is complete. Frankly, the Emperor in Star Wars had more integrity than these neo-cons. Hiatt truly is a lapdog. — santafe2

I showed the article and comments to several friends of various backgrounds. One who works in media shot back: “if you don’t like the message, ignore it and kill the messenger!”

A friend who homeschools her children — and does it so well that the oldest has won a full academic scholarship to a university — was surprised that commenters would express such contempt not for the committee findings, which contradicted their worldview, but for the reporter who covered it. “It’s illogical,” she said. “Do public schools no longer teach critical thinking skills?”

Curious about that myself, I asked a friend who teaches social studies at a local and very well-regarded high school. “We’re supposed to be teaching critical thinking,” she said. “It’s in all the local and state standards, but in practice … there’s only so much time.” [bold mine]

I wish words could express my extreme lack of sympathy.

If, over the last two hundred years, we had somehow regressed from a technologically-rich culture stuffed chock-full with iced mocha vanilla lattes, iPods, a personal computer in every house running a 32-bit flat-memory-model operating system, flatbed scanners, twelve megapixel digital cameras, coffee cup warmers, Tivo, wireless hubs, tablet PCs, snips snails and puppy-dog’s tails…down to a dystopian wasteland in which everyone can do whatever they’re going to do after putting in their fifteen hours a day plowing fields for the spring potato planting, so that their ten or twelve children don’t starve to death, that is the ones that don’t succumb to smallpox or yellow fever or malaria — had we gone in that direction, then I could see it. Oh dear oh dear, there’s all that planting and harvesting to be done. We’d better just cover reading, writing and penmanship. Critical thinking they can learn to do at home (they’d have to do it anyway, huh?).

As it is, we’ve been trudging headlong in the opposite direction. We have comfort. Our grandparents did not. The widespread loss of critical thinking is something far more poignant than an event transpiring coincidentally with our accumulation of jewel-encrusted cell phones and dogs bred to be carried around in $600 purses. It is a symptom. We don’t think critically because there’s little need to. If you can’t think your way out of a paper bag — you’ll still have a warm dry place to sleep tonight, and a plateful of grub when you get up tomorrow. Necessity gone. Critical thinking, a thing of the past.

How tough do we have it, really? Our most threatening menace is a gallon of gas that costs four dollars and sixty cents. And we really don’t have much call for facing down such a menace; just bitching about it for a second or two, and we’re done with that. So we don’t confront threats. We don’t do it every day, we don’t do it once a month, we don’t even do it as the years roll by. Without the necessity of truly confronting a threat, in command of responses-to-stimuli that can actually change the outcome, the need to think critically becomes a memento from the distant past.

What you’re seeing here is the struggle to remain part of an accepted group. Hey look at me I still think Bush lied. Hey look at me I have all this dripping acrid venom for anyone who suggests otherwise. Look at me, look at me, look at me…I’m saying all the right stuff.

Please let me keep my membership card.

Meanwhile — Scott McClellan doesn’t know much of anything. There are no facts to back up this opinion that Bush, Cheney, et al, lied. There is only the big money of George Soros, spent to convince teeming millions of fellow citizens that they did. This provides reassurance that there will be a large group, ready to accept anyone who hates Bush and is willing to say so. And membership of a group — any group — has taken the place of a bushel of grain. It is the new coin of the realm, the new token of continuing survival. There has to be one, at all times, you know. It’s how we operate.

Without the necessity of getting that fall harvest in, or of killing diseases before they wipe out your whole family, or driving off a pack of wolves with a blunderbuss — or something like those — all that’s left is the challenge of staying socially accepted. And you’ll notice as these challenges continue to disappear, the challenge of staying socially accepted becomes something that has to be “confronted,” such as it is, more and more frequently. The membership is up for renewal every month, then every week, then multiple times a day they have to spew their nonsense to stay inside that glorious perimeter.

This acceleration over time rises up as an especially intriguing commentary on the human mind and how it works. I would almost call it an indictment; logically, no protective countermeasure should have to be brandished or deployed with greater frequency, as the associated threat is in a state of recession…but here we are. What we’re seeing is a short-circuiting that takes place, manifesting our collective conscious’ inability to deal with diminishing problems: With a constant voltage, current is inversely proportional to resistance, so with resistance removed the current skyrockets toward infinity, eventually melting down whatever hardware is used to carry it.

That’s what is happening to us. That is precisely what is happening to us.

How else to explain it? The social studies teacher has time to teach critical thinking, time that teachers of the post-civil-war era didn’t have. And she can’t quite get ‘er done. Not that I would blame her; the kids aren’t ready for it anymore. Their circuitry has melted down.

Collecting their news and information from Comedy Central and internet forums rich with satire and irony, everything has become a joke for our young — the “truthiness” that “feels” right, an acceptable alternative to solid facts or findings. But clever jokes and easy cynicism will not right the wrongs of the world or encourage serious governance over the cartoonish politics of the day.

I should mention I first learned of Anchoress’ fine piece via Rick, who has his own thoughts.

This is a great splitting-boundary between the stuff we call conservatism and the opposite stuff we call liberalism. It defines the boundary because it identifies an area in which we are adapting to a new set of challenges by jettisoning the abilities we needed to confront the older set of challenges. We are evolving, and in so doing, becoming less capable.

Boiled down to its essentials, modern-day liberalism asserts that all evolution is good, even if it incorporates weaknesses that did not exist previously, or expunges capabilities and talents that did. Conservatism is simply a more open-minded and curious opposite, daring to pose the question: Maybe all change is not necessarily good? Liberalism, being inherently closed-minded, has no response for this question but anger, scorn, ridicule and aspersion.

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Scott McClellan Doesn’t KnowSaturday, June 21st, 2008

Scott McClellan Doesn’t Know
Saturday, June 21st, 2008