Fact v. opinion

Herman Cain, GOP prez. candidate (with little chance of winning), has declared that Obama's refusal to defend the Defense of Marriage Act in federal court is an impeachable offense.



William Broyles wrote an opinion piece for Newsweek comparing Obama to Neville Chamberlain. He was the one who, while Prime Minister of Britain, was desperate to avoid war with Germany. So he acceded to every one of Hitler's demands and got war anyway. Chamberlain eventually realized he was the wrong man to lead Britain and resigned to make room for Churchill.

Broyles says that Obama wants to avoid conflict with the GOP, so accedes to every demand, and is surprised when the GOP ups the ante. According to Broyles Obama should declare he will not run for reelection and give his support to Hillary Clinton, "the leader we should have chosen in the first place."

This is a rare case in which I mentioned an article to my friend and debate partner before writing about it here. Alas, I didn't have the conclusion correct when we talked. Even so, my friend thinks Obama isn't surprised, but knows exactly what is going on when the GOP ups the ante for the next issue.

Both of us think it is significant and important for Newsweek to publish an article like this.

This article ended up at the top of the Newsweek most popular articles when I checked to get the link.



The editorial in Between the Lines from more than a week ago says, "Extremism can't be 'balanced'." Though there are lots of examples out there the one that got BTL's attention was an NPR segment that discussed the "controversy" of gay conversion therapy. This is not a controversy. All respected mental health authorities say conversion therapy does not work and is harmful. So why did NPR call up the crackpots to get a quote in order to "balance" the article? Why did it reclassify a fact as an opinion?

According to BTL, the problem is that NPR felt it didn't have the authority to label extreme views as extreme. NPR is not the only one with this problem. One news source has a hard time being an authority because information is so readily available. The exception is Fox News who claims authority because their ratings are so high. Their ratings are high because they focus on the emotional and don't care about logic or truth. Fox has used its position of high ratings to attack other journalists for being biased, and those attacked cower from the onslaught and give up their authority.

Negotiate v. Appease

With the GOP eagerly tossing around the idea that negotiating with terrorist or dictators is the same as appeasement, here is a thoughtful Newsweek article by Evan Thomas about the history of this rhetorical grenade. In 1938 Neville Chamberlain went to Munich struck a deal with Hitler that Germany would be allowed to take over Czechoslovakia with no objection and would then leave Britain alone. Hitler took over Czechoslovakia and a couple years later went after Britain. Chamberlain's blunder has echoed through American politics since then with mixed results. The good results were the Cuban Missile Crisis (in which Kennedy successfully followed "Munich" in public and negotiated in secret), and Reagan's success in negotiating arms reductions with the USSR. The bad results were wars in Korea, Vietnam, and the Bay of Pigs. After we were bogged down in Vietnam it served as a balance to Munich. The lesson is that global situations rarely neatly fit the mold of Munich or Vietnam and that negotiation is not always appeasement.

In a companion piece, Christopher Hitchens takes a look at the recent book "Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War" by Pat Buchanan (yes, the occasional candidate for prez. on the GOP side). Buchanan did get a few things right -- the abysmal bungling of French and British attempts at diplomacy is one bright spot in the book. But the rest includes a lot of ignoring or misinterpreting of facts to allow Buchanan to fit his view of the war into the thesis he is trying to prove. While Hitchens does a good job of ripping the book to shreds, he doesn't answer my burning question. To what end is Buchanan reinterpreting history? Who gains? What political or cultural idea is he trying to promote? The book doesn't seem to serve the idea that America is a Christian nation, the goal of lots of other historical revisionism. Nor does he seem to be promoting Bush's reasons for going to war, because his idea is that even WWII wasn't worth it. So what is it?