Liz Cheney: A Primer in Invalid Argumentation

[ Minion, I'll spell check after I get to work, so don't bother pointing out my errors and typos.]

Oh, Morning Joe, if all the world be a stage then those who play at vacuous spew use Moring Joe as their green room. Liz Cheney this morning is continuing her media tour promoting the patriotic heroism of her father. Here's a stripped down summary of her talking points:

So it's just a difference of oppinion. I mean, intellegent men can disagree, and this is just one of those times. Sure torture is illegal, but that's the thing, see water boarding is not torture.

So that's part one of Liz's by proxy defence of her super villain father, that the act we are debating simply does not qualify as torture and therefore as not illegal.

Part two, the OLC wrote legal opinions telling us that these techniques that the intellegence community desperately wanted to use were perfectly legal.

Also, it worked. These "techniques" (which is a word Obama has chosen to use to describe these acts) produced "actionable intellegence".

That's part three, that by doing these things attacks on America were stopped.

Further, what would you do if you thought an attack on your wife and children was eminant? Wouldnt you use every technique at your disposal to stop that from happening?

That's part four that after 9 Eleven, we thought another attack was iminant and that we made the decision to use every technique at our disposal to keep another attack from happening.

Let's just go through this real quick. This is a pretty easy debunk:

Part 1: Waterboarding, the subject "technique" was illegal when the United States prosecuted Japanese soldiers in WWII, and US soldiers during Viet Nam. So there is a precedential chain that establishes the illegality of waterboarding. Further there are no, not one, case of the aquital of someone chaged with waterboarding who has been found not guilty of torture. To be precise, not everyone accused and found guilty of a crime is guilty of a crime, but everyone found guilty of waterboarding is not guilty of waterboarding they are guilty of torture and a war crime. It was torture during the spanish inquisition, it was torture during WWII, during the reign of Pinochet, and during the race wars in the Balkins. It is decided law.

Part 2: The memos were recinded. They were recinded by subsequent Bush administration OLC lawyers and not because a policy had shifted but because they were irresponsible and a poor excuse for legal opining. Further, that as Eugene Robinson argued, if the standard for legality is a memo from a lawyer, and that that opinion is only invalid if it can be proved the opinion was a departure from the lawyers genuine understanding of the law, then I am 1) proposing that I may rob banks with impunity, and that I have this right because of a very important but subtle component of Texas community property rights, that I won't go into now and 2) I'm going to law school 3) I'm going to start writing memos.

Part 3: The more information we get our hands on, the more memos that are released, the more we believe this to be false. It is becoming clear that we got all the information we needed from FBI interogators before the CIA started with torture. We also know that torture victims will say anything to make the torture stop. If this is not the case I'm suggesting we extradite Senator John McCain to Viet Nam to stand trial for the war crims he claimed to committ while a prisoner there in the sixties and seventies.

Part 4: This is the ultimate Republican judo look at the shiny thing technique. Judo because it takes their own cowardice in the face of crisis and attempts to apply it to the democrats who they believe are to cowardly to break the law or to "do what it takes". It's the shiny thing in the same way that the nuclear smoking gun meme was so powerful. Really though, how do you know another attack is eminant? What are the grounds by which we come to this conclussion? And what is eminant? Is eminant by 9/21? Is eminant by 9/11/02? How long can a terrorist be in custody and still be in possesion of intellegence on eminant attacks? A week? A month?

One last point, the right thing to do would be to find every single individual who had a hand in facilitating torture and prosocute them. We can prosecute Nancy Pelosi AND Dick Cheney now, in American courts, have the investigations and the trials right now under our control, or they can happen 10 years from now in Germany, or Spain or Holland. There will be accountability on the democratic and republican sides, and the choice we have is weather we want to control that acountability or leave it to someone else.

IMPORTANT UPDATE

I was going to blog about the difference between inductive and deductive reasoning, the apparent preference for these operating models on each side of the political spectrum and the ramifications of these tendencies on cultural norms and social institutions, but I have decided to write a sonnet dedicated to my wife's mucus:

Minion, behold the nadir of the lyric:

Dreams and pathways I have known

The times of man eons peak and eras trough

Cacophonous yalp as virally sewn

Still lyrical I hear my dear love's cough

Harmonious day flees panoptical night

And a green phlegm rubicon traverse

Viscus, cascading snot affright

Fly, silent fever embrace the inevitable adverse

Forgotten roads through rooky woods meander

Cursed cough, thy name is emerald molasses

Among fallen timbers and brush forever wander

Pray, find your place amid begotten corpses

And time, immortal guardian of aged, ailing genus locus

A dimming light, we say goodnight to all my Love's disgusting mucus

Note to Shark, re: Jumping

Oh, dear sweet baby jebus. Morning Joe has done it. That's it. They've laid out in very clear terms the structural diagram, or playbook if you will, for the architecture of douschbaggery.

1) Apparently we were one country on September 11 and a different country on September 12.
2) Apparently we all gave up our entire philosophy of governance on September 12 in order to shift our allegiance to the federal government. This includes "libertarians" and "small government conservatives" like Joe.
3) Apparently anyone who thinks we should prosecute our "leaders" for past acts of "laywers for issuing legal opinions" is a pure ideologue.
4) Apparently the fact that SERE school exists is proof that there is a precedent for "enhanced interigation techniques" in the world and therefore there must be a "gray area" concerning the legality of the acts.

Did I say douschbaggery? What I meant was cowardice. The limbic brain manifest. American exceptionalism writ large, amoral familialism just came into the MSNBC studio at Rockafeller plaza looked straight into the camera and took a dump in Mika Brzynski's shoe, the allegator Bruno Magli's with extra high heel.

MSNBC, what the hell are you doing with these idiots?

I've just learned....

... a new word: Atavistic. It has reminded me that I had proposed a muse-fest on the distinction between arcadian and utopian. The report concerning compensation in the executive class last year might be an adequate vehicle with which to drop some knowledge.

Minion, remind me to get back to that later.

I tend to eschew...

...polling data for a couple reasons. First, one can never underestimate the deep and profound ignorance of the American people. As a collective they can, therefore, not be relied upon to understand the complex nature of their surroundings, the human condition or the process where by sliced bread is place in proximity to a radient heat source and becomes toast. Second, polls are not just a reflection of our collective ignorance they judge only the relationship of our collective ignorance to historical events and constructs and not the relationship of the events to the constructs. In other words, polls tend to record our ignorance of our surroundings more than the nature of our surroundings, but as this flaw in polls exists within the surroundings we collectively cannot comprehend, in some ways we change the outcome by measuring it.

None the less, this poll is interesting, precisely becuase the trajectory on which American ignorance can be judged would suggest a different output. Apparently only 53% of Americans believe capitalism is better than socialism. That's suprising, nes cafe?

Dear Ms. Noonan

WOULD YOU JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP.

Sincerely,

Thoughtful People of the World

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What is the point of Morning Joe? I'm struck now with the realization, finally, that it's not that they're bad at what they're supposed to doing, its that they're really good and doing something bad. For fifteen minutes now they've been talking about how Obama did in the G-20 in terms of style... Style. Did he look presidential, seems to be the main point of discussion. Branding 101, truly, but idocy in the extreme for political discourse. And of course Joe has to slip in the occassional negative remark regarding France.

I don't even know why Republicans don't like France, I quite literally do not remember what the problem is. I thought it was that they didn't think we should invade Iraq, but that can't possibly be it, because surely they'd be vindicated for that view. It's hard to say now.

Back to Morning Joe

Praise the lord and pass the Fleischman's Bagels, maybe with a little cream cheese, just a light schmeer, you don't want to get all schleferdik  this early.

I don't know who the woman was they just had on but she understood the economy, she understood the difference between fiscal and monetary policy in the long and short term, and she could explain her views on past and future mistakes and triumphs.

It didn't seem like she was hocking a book or show.... Pat Buchanan the grand wizard of the Du Dousche Dan spoke to her with respect. This does not portend well.