Blog Archive

Awhile back I discussed political gotchas and the search for WMDS in a post entitled Brain Surgery With a Butter Knife. What I was attempting to communicate in that post was a political culture that looks for trip wires and rhetorical technicalities that they can pin on the enemy. Those who disagree with them are idiots or evil or both. The media spin cycle is full of this and rare is the occasion where the talking heads admit over-reaction when the facts they relied on have changed or been proven to be false. They pretend that politics is clean and focused instead of messy and diffuse; they want politicians that are mathematically precise and honest to a fault. This is not reality and it never has been.

I don’t bring all this up to pat myself on the back, rather I wanted to note a perfect example of what I am talking about. Eugene Volokh, writing in NRO, outlines how pundits jumped all over VP Dick Cheney for what turns out to have simply been a mis-statement followed by clear cut assertion of the truth:

Rumsfeld’s and Cheney’s critics are making a far greater error: Though they are literally correct when they quote Cheney as saying Saddam had nuclear weapons, they don’t even hint to their readers that instead of “recklessly exaggerat[ing],” Cheney quite likely simply misspoke ? and that rather than trying to mislead people into thinking that Saddam had nuclear weapons, Cheney repeatedly suggested the contrary several times in the very interview that they’re quoting.

The media has been found guilty of this repeatedly lately, see Maureen Dowd, but it continues unabated. If history has taught me one thing it is that events and people are complicated. The massive over-simplification of arguments and the related attempts to microscopically slice and dice words until they prove your point does not further good policy. It is one thing to have arguments about fundamental principles and big picture goals but it is another to fail to give anyone the benefit of a fair reading of their words.

One of the things that is refreshing about the web and blogs is that it creates access to transcripts and entire articles. Bloggers can check the record and see whether pundits or politicians are stretching the truth to score points. Check out this Kausfiles piece as an example (scroll down to Scalia, slandered). You have Kaus digging deeper to reveal a pundit unfairly attacking Justice Scalia and that same day the pundit admitting he was wrong! Score one for the blogs.