What Are You Thinking?

Yesterday, Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama had this to say about impeachment:

"There's a way to bring an end to those practices, you know: vote the bums out," the presidential candidate said, without naming Bush or Cheney. "That's how our system is designed." [ ... ]

"I think you reserve impeachment for grave, grave breeches, and intentional breeches of the president's authority," he said. [Emphasis mine.]

*blink* *blink*

Let's review:

• Torture of prisoners in US custody, in violation of the Geneva Convention and the Fifth , Sixth, and Eighth Amendments.
• Comprehensive wiretapping of every domestic telephone line, without a warrant or even probable cause, in violation of the Fourth Amendment.
• Leaving New Orleans and surrounding area to rot in the wake of hurricane Katrina.
• Fabricating "intelligence" before Congress as a pretext to war (Congressional perjury).
• Compromising a covert intelligence agent's identity -- destroying that agent's value in the field, and destroying the intelligence network that agent created and maintained -- solely for political retaliation.
• Refusal to comply with Congressional subpoenas.
• Refusal to cooperate with oversight agencies.
• Refusal to tell the truth about any damned thing at all.

And that's just off the top of my head.

Tell me, Mister Senator: If this does not constitute, "grave grave breaches and intentional breaches of the President's authority..." What, pray tell, does?

Seriously. I'd like to know. We would all like to know.

Ad Hominem

In debate circles, one of the available tactics to participants is the ad hominem attack -- the personal attack. Rather than deconstructing or attacking your opponent's arguments and assumptions, you simply attack your opponent. You call into question their character, or their intellect, or their religious faith, or their fashion sense, or their personal hygiene, etc.

This tactic has seen a surge of use in authoritarian circles against dissenters of all stripes in the last few years. Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly have made careers out of it. Once their handful of genuine arguments is exhausted, they resort to personal insults. This typically takes the form of questioning the dissenter's patriotism, but occasionally it descends even further into sneering remarks about the social mores of their region of residence, the quality of their haircut, and other non sequiturs.

As debate tactics go, it's quite lame, and says more about the weakness of the attacker's position than of their target. Long-time readers of NetNews are all-too familiar with it, and eventually learn to discount insult-laced screeds out of hand.

That's why I find posts like this disappointing. We are shown a video of President Bush stumbling through yet another unrehearsed public address, and the accompanying copy reads, "See how lame he looks. Wow, that's lame. Must've been painful to have been in the room with all that lameness."

Look, Bush's public speaking skills have always been below par. That's not news. I'm no friend of this President, but the linked post is essentially content-free. It's an ad hominem. It's not even weakly couched inside a broader commentary about immigration policy ("The President's speech about immigration today, which was really lame, spoke of Congress' need to cooperate..."). No, it was just a personal attack, and nothing more. And not even a very good personal attack.

We can do better than that. In fact, we must do better than that. Authoritarians resort to ad hominem because their positions are ethically and logically weak or, quite often, wholly bankrupt. Our positions are strong, well-reasoned, and bolstered by facts. I enjoy the occasional imaginative, well-crafted snark as much as anyone. But, like candy, it should be a lightly-used garnish rather than the whole content. We have the luxury of a wide variety of fine argumentation tools at our disposal. We don't need to reach for that blunt instrument. Put it away.

Why "Blowback"?

Happily, Blogger lets you change the title (and the URL, apparently) at any time. But before I knew that, I sat bashing in various phrases ranging from snotty to ridiculous ("The Correct Pulpit," "You Aren't Paying Attention," "Rantopia," "Environmentally-Conscious Dilithium Crystal Mine") and seeing how they looked. Eventually the word "blowback" spilled on to the keyboard, and it seemed to resonate.

"Blowback" has a few definitions, but the one I immediately seized on was the slang interpretation among the government intelligence agencies referring to unintended consequences resulting from covert operations. It occurred to me that the entire "netroots" movement could be thought of as blowback resulting from decades of misdeeds by right-wing authoritarians. The history of the United States, as romanticized as it is, is replete with examples of Bad People doing Bad Deeds. Sometimes, only the prism of hindsight reveals Deeds or People as Bad. But when Bad Deeds or Bad People are instantly obvious to rational individuals as Bad, and those people do nothing about it, is when the opportunity arises for them to become Very Bad Deeds and Very Bad People.

It's easy to get the idea that things, as they are now, are the worst that things have ever been (or the best that things have ever been (Charles Dickens, call your office)). Without omniscience, we cannot know, in relative terms, how grave the excesses of the current Administration are compared to the excesses of the Roman Empire, the Inquisition, the Islamic Caliphates, the emperors of China, and so forth. But it's pretty obvious to see that our Administration is doing Bad Deeds.

Let me emphasize that: That our Administration is doing Bad Deeds is, at this point, obvious. There is absolutely no rational basis for believing otherwise, and little excuse for not being aware of it. Yet, the Bad Deeds continue, and the people tasked with looking for Bad Deeds and putting a stop to them (the Justice Department), or at least shining a bright light on them (the media and press), have steadfastly remained inert and silent. And that leads inexorably to Very Bad Deeds.

There are zillions of us who recognize Bad Deeds are happening. But we expected -- indeed, we were taught -- that there were other people who would take care of it. The press would shame them into stopping, or the police would haul them off to jail. And in fact that worked in the past.

But today, for some reason, it's not working. It's broken. In fact, it's worse than broken -- it's backwards. The press is shining a light on these Bad Deeds, and telling us they're good things (or, if you push them in to a corner, that they're necessary things, made necessary by the vagaries of war). The police likewise are looking straight at the Bad Deeds and saying, "What are you complaining about? There's nothing wrong." In some cases, the police themselves are doing the Bad Deeds. Lawyers and Officials are trying to inject uncertainty and semantic ambiguity into what used to be taken for crystal-clear language and actions, and building self-serving arguments on top of them. And then the media uncritically broadcasts these arguments without so much as a hint of dissent or even ironic commentary. Bad Deeds are happening, everyone can see they're Bad Deeds, and yet an enormous amount of effort is being put into telling us they're not Bad Deeds, and we should shut the hell up about it.

...And thus is born the conditions for Blowback.

I get the impression that the "netroots" movement came as something of a Complete Surprise to right-wing authoritarians. "How dare they question us?" seems to be the principal refrain. "How dare they attempt to rise above their station?" I suspect this is the same general class of Complete Surprise as was the Shah of Iran being deposed in the late 1970's. Or the various "leftist" movements in Central and South America, displacing US-supported dictators. That this reaction comes as any surprise at all illustrates one of two things:

1. These people are stupid,
2. These people are paying attention to something else.

I hope to explore the latter possibility in subsequent rants. It's easy to demonize people doing Bad Deeds as Bad People, but that's a cop-out. It "discards" the people without analyzing their motivations. I don't believe sociopaths make up that significant a fraction of the population, so I'm prepared to believe these are intelligent, possibly well-meaning, people who are thinking about something else. Some other ethical structure or framework is in their mind that will immediately explain their actions, and all that remains is for us to discover it. Then we can all have our "Ah-ha!" moment, correct or address their misconceptions, and move on.

But in the meantime, there are a lot of intelligent, rational people who are angry and frustrated. They are angry and frustrated because they know Bad Deeds are happening, they know Bad Deeds when they see them, and know that they need to do something to make them stop before they become Very Bad Deeds. This blog is a result of that frustration.

This blog is Blowback.

Update 2007-06-29:11:09: As I'm just getting started, it should be pointed out that everything, including the blog's title, is subject to change.

I only bring this up because my sweetie informs me that she very much would have preferred "Rantopia." *sigh*

C:\> format blog:

This blog was created on impulse. As such, there's no plan, no strategy, no vision of things to come. (#include <iraq_punchline.h>) I have vague ideas about contemporaneous political and social rants but, honestly, I'm not sure what I'm going to do yet.

As is my fashion, I've immediately become distracted by the goodies to control page design and layout, so I'll probably start by wasting far too much time with that.

But, as the old Chinese proverb goes, "A journey of ten thousand miles begins with a three-hour schlep to the airport." We have to start somewhere, so let's call it here.