House of Eratosthenes

Last week blogger pal Phil sent me an offline with a link to a new editorial in the Wall Street Journal. It was written by Peter Berkowitz, a college professor now serving on Rudy Giulliani’s campaign and it had some interesting observations and conclusions about Bush Derangement Syndrome, or BDS:

Hating the president is almost as old as the republic itself….Bush hatred, however, is distinguished by the pride intellectuals have taken in their hatred, openly endorsing it as a virtue and enthusiastically proclaiming that their hatred is not only a rational response to the president and his administration but a mark of good moral hygiene.

My reply to this was something to the effect that if you really want to see some Bush hatred, start a link on this story over on FARK. So I set out to prove it. Of course, the results were just as satisfying in retrospect as they were predictable in prospect (since the link was not greenlit, you need TOTALFARK access to view it — well worth the money overall, but if all you want to do is see this then I wouldn’t recommend it).

One of my litmus tests for what Professor Berkowitz has been talking about, is the substitution of caustic wit for even-handed analysis — BDS has convinced many an otherwise reasoned intellect that no matter how complicated a subject, if it can only be connected somehow to George W. Bush then a biting snarky bumper-sticker-sized one-liner will sum up everything about it, leaving no worthy detail unmentioned. To help demonstrate that I worded the headline as Hating President Bush might inflict damage on your intellect. If you’re ready to type in a snappy comeback, it probably already has.

I was hoping to snag some haughty directions from some of the dedicated leftists, of the “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” variety. To my surprise, the dedicated left-wingers skipped right past that and busied themselves with proving the point, with snarkisms such as “What’s wrong with hating him simply because he’s a stupid asshole?” But you know, FARK is always good for giving you additional perspective on something. And it wasn’t long before user VictoryCabal tossed up a “rebuttal” by…drum roll please…Glenn Greenwald.

Okay, well this was interesting. Glenn Greenwald is pretty much the opposite of what I was talking about — you can’t get too much more distant from a one-liner bumper sticker slogan than Greenwald. He’s earned a reputation for grinding out monster treatises, that make my own ravings look like knock-knock jokes by comparison…no mean feat, that. But at least when you’ve finished a Greenwald piece, you know pretty much everything about a given subject that you’ll ever want to know.

Ah…actually, that last statement was a bit of humor. It’s not really true. It would probably be more accurate to say when you’ve read a Greenwald piece, you’ll see Mr. Greenwald’s intended thesis supported by cherry-picked evidence in every way that thesis can conceivably be supported…which is in itself a tragedy, because the core thesis to a Greenwald column is invariably something Greenwald himself would not confess. The thesis is always something ridiculous.

In this case, if stated, it would read something like this: “I intend to demonstrate that the Wall Street Journal is something you should not be reading if you’re a good liberal like me, and that since this editorial came from the Wall Street Journal, you should not be reading it unless you’re ready for me to call you a bad person for having read it.” Or…something like that. I read this Greenwald “rebuttal” top to bottom, and believe me, it attempts to prove or support absolutely nothing outside of that narrow scope.

The logic used by Mr. Greenwald is rather embarrassing. What he’s arguing is the essence of the argumentum ad hominem logical fallacy: He hopes to make his readers less enlightened, by pitching to them that they shouldn’t be reading the Wall Street Journal, showering them with anecdotes from the mid-1990’s in which WSJ was either caught off-guard, snowed, joshed, bullshitted — or observed being more inspective and critical of this-or-that Clinton scandal than Mr. Greenwald thought they should have been.

About Greenwald On the actual content of Berkowitz’s editorial, Greenwald is silent. So calling this a “rebuttal” is kind of like calling a Michael Moore film a “documentary.” It’s not altogether bad, what Greenwald wrote. It’s just poorly described. It should be given a different title, something like what I said above. Something like “I avoid WSJ and so should you.” But it is a rebuttal to nothing.

What’s embarrassing about Greenwald’s logic, is that it would be devastating to it’s author. Greenwald is the guy who got caught sock-puppeting last year. Ace of Spades compiled as decent a write-up on the episode as anyone else, and if you don’t know what sock-puppetry is you will by the time you finish. But since those articles investigate their selected subjects to the extent that Greenwald intends to investigate his, they come up a bit dry. A little short on entertainment value. So if you’re after that, you’d probably prefer Wuzzadem’s illustrated parody which has become an Internet classic.

In short, Greenwald is a self-promoting fraud, a self-flatterer, a show-off and if he isn’t an out-and-out liar, the best that could be said about him is that he regards blatant deliberate deception very casually if it is friendly to his goals. Allowing an energized zealot to cherry-pick your facts for you is always a bad idea, but allowing an energized zealot like Greenwald to do it is a very bad idea.

This is to be concluded not from apocrypha or legend, but rather from observed and documented events.

Glenn Greenwald, this time you have blown your foot off. At the neck. And, in so doing, you demonstrated Prof. Berkowitz’s point for him. BDS is damaging to the intellect of those who allow it to fester. Giving your “rebuttal” a fair hearing, we see someone with a very high opinion of himself who promotes himself as an accomplished scholar of constitutional law, setting out to refute the professor’s point, and rather sturdily proving it instead.

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- Webloggin - Blog Archive » The Insanity of Bush Hatred | 11/19/2007 @ 14:57
Until today, I always thought spit takes were the stuff of bad sitcoms. However, I snarfed my tea onto my shiny new laptop after reading this line:

“He’s earned a reputation for grinding out monster treatises, that make my own ravings look like knock-knock jokes by comparison”

You owe me for a laptop cleaning Freeberg!
- Duffy | 11/19/2007 @ 15:09
I thought the wuzzadem piece was a classic. But I found myself having a different thought after reading Ace of Spades.

Let us suppose the comments were made by other people. That implies something pretty scary. Individual A, “I know what, I’ll go over and cut and paste his bio, make a few changes and whammo that will really show them.” Individual B, same thing. Now one thing I’m pretty certain of is that people with the same disease do show the same symptoms so I can’t knock the hypothesis completely out of the box.

Suppose they were different people? With that kind of thinking I wouldn’t let them make change. They might hurt themselves.

So either way, be afraid be very afraid, the brainless zombies are wandering through the neighborhood.

Cheers
- Allen L | 11/20/2007 @ 01:22

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The Insanity of Bush HatredMonday, November 19th, 2007

The Insanity of Bush Hatred
Monday, November 19th, 2007