A Humble Prediction

I'm going to try to avoid the blogosphere for a couple of days. Why? Because I predict that, in the increasingly incestuous and irrelevant blogosphere, most energy will be directed, not at saying anything interesting about the capture of that rat bastard Saddam, but, rather, at exaggerating and ridiculing the Other Side of the 'Sphere (whichever one that happens to be). The right side of the 'Sphere will crow as if this shows that the war were prudent and the president truthful. Many on the left will mope and lash out, fueling the fires on the right. Blinded by their dislike of each other and their disagreement about Bush, they'll forget about Saddam and Iraq almost entirely. The left won't even be able to revel in this most happy consequence of our ill-advised war. Fah. I don't need this crap in my life.

The right acts as if it has accepted the following inference: Saddam is terrifically evil; Bush opposes Saddam; so Bush must be good. The left acts as if it has accepted this one: Bush is a very bad man; Bush opposes Saddam; so Saddam must not be that bad.

But both inferences are defective. Note also that, though both inferences have true premisses, both have false conclusions.

Saddam is evil and Bush is merely awful, but Bush's awfulness hits closer to home for Americans. If we ignore either Bush's awfulness or Saddam's black, bottomless, inhuman evil, we're ignoring something important about the world.

But for now, I'm outta here.