Blog Archive

I have been beating up on Will Saletan lately for his rabid anti-Bush sophistry (see here and here) but now I have someone from his own website to back me up. Granted it isn’t quite as harsh but it points out the larger issue. Here is Mickey Kaus on Kerry’s “No Child” Panderflop:

Ron Brownstein’s Monday column is the beginning of wisdom, and maybe the end, on Kerry’s No Child Left Behind position. It’s, yes, a flip-flop–and not a pretty one. My colleague Will Saletan, in a very clever piece last week, suggested that Kerry’s switch on NCLB was justified . . . Except, as Brownstein shows, Kerry does more than call for putting more money behind the new law. He has switched positions on the core of the bill he voted for, buying into the teachers’ unions’ self-serving desire to water down the law’s standards by taking into account ‘inputs’ as well as results[.]

Kaus calls it very clever but it really is sophistry – the clever use of argument to get the wrong answer (my definition). It is clear to me that Saletan has got it in for Bush and is now writing columns that attack the President rather than present the issues.