Double-Standard Watch
Gingrich: Obama Has "Already Failed"
(Bush Awaits The Judgment of History...)
Well, there's this.
I know, I know. These are not matters for serious people to fret over. But remember: a blog is largely a substitute for yelling at the t.v...
The basic point of all this: we are apparently to suspend judgment about Bush's monumental f*ck-ups, perpetually awaiting the judgment of future history, Obama can immediately be judged a failure if he fails to clean up Bush's f*ck-ups in a few months.
Get it?
Then there's the John Voight business, which I actually found pretty amusing, in part because I think it's good for liberals to see how annoying it is for mindless Hollywood types to share with us their political mindlessness. It's generally instructive to have the tables turned, I think. Barbara Streisand & co. already nauseate me, and still I find the Voight business instructive in some way.
Gingrich: Obama Has "Already Failed"
(Bush Awaits The Judgment of History...)
Well, there's this.
I know, I know. These are not matters for serious people to fret over. But remember: a blog is largely a substitute for yelling at the t.v...
The basic point of all this: we are apparently to suspend judgment about Bush's monumental f*ck-ups, perpetually awaiting the judgment of future history, Obama can immediately be judged a failure if he fails to clean up Bush's f*ck-ups in a few months.
Get it?
Then there's the John Voight business, which I actually found pretty amusing, in part because I think it's good for liberals to see how annoying it is for mindless Hollywood types to share with us their political mindlessness. It's generally instructive to have the tables turned, I think. Barbara Streisand & co. already nauseate me, and still I find the Voight business instructive in some way.
posted by Winston Smith at
9:49 AM
2 Comments:
Winston,
I understand the general point you're trying to make, but I think that you need to provide more explicit evidence of a *double standard*.
I know it seems ridiculous to attempt to be fair to a cretin like Gingrich, but I did (an admittedly cursory) google search to see if I could find evidence of Gingrich himself saying GWB would be 'vindicated by history'; I even used several other potential wordings of same. In any event, I couldn't find such evidence.*
So my problem here is your contruction of a double standard by (implicitly) arguing thus:
1. Person A (Gingrich) belongs to Group X (conservatives, say or Republicans).
2. It was fashionable for Group X to make some claim C (frex, that though Bush's policies appeared to be a complete disaster while he was president, some day subsequent events would prove his policies successful/effective)
3. Person A is now making claim C(o), that is at logical odds with the previously in-fashion claim of Group X (i.e. that we can judge Obama's policies' efficacy solely by their already-apparent effects, regardless of what events occur in the future).
Therefore,
4. Person A has a double standard when it comes to judgments of success, as based on the conflict between claims C and C(o).
Now you can say that Gingrich implicitly believed claim C, since he didn't explicitly disown that claim at the time (e.g. say that it's ridiculous that time and subsequent events could bear out the value of Bush's policies, which were clearly failures), but that hardly seems fair to me.
It also reminds me of a common rhetorical strategy I encounter on the internets whereby an interlocutor attempts to ascribe to me every absurd claim or opinion ever uttered by a member of my preferred political group (e.g. liberals, or Democrats), and presume that I should have the burden of arguing against that opinion; or that I can't reasonably hold the present belief for which I'm arguing because _________ (fill in liberal standard-bearer here) once said the opposite. Especially since I didn't condemn those opinions of liberal X at the time. Or that since Group G, of which I'm a member, had generally believed C, so my disagreement with C now is somehow invalid. It's in effect a demand for dogmatic adherence to either liberal or conservative orthodoxy at every turn. I mean I could easily share basic principles with Group G and yet think its general opinion on some issue in the past was wrong, but my failure to make public my disapproval at the time shouldn't preclude me from offering my disagreement with the argument now. Seems like an instantiation of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_division
The more valid point would be the demonstration that those in the audience applauding Gingrich's claim, or people citing or linking to it approvingly, had in the past subscribed to the 'Bush will be vindicated by history' meme.
*Of course I remain open to the possibility that such evidence does exist and I just can't find it. If so, I will admit error.
No, I'm definitely not committing the fallacy of division--but I AM lumping together all the conservative Obama critics. That's not fair to Gingrich, but I didn't have him specifically in mind...which is exactly the problem you're pointing out, LC, and I think it's an important one.
Such charges of inconsistency are easy if you lump everybody on the other side together.
Point appreciatively taken.
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