Gibbs: We Have Ways of Making You Talk

Via Ace, we have Obama spokesdroid Robert Gibbs admitting that waterboarding worked, but who knows what else would have worked?

In the category of things that work, there are two obvious categories: mean and nice. There is no logical room between them.

The mean things are being roundly criticized as Stuff We Wouldn't Do To Save LA. If there are mean things that are not as mean as those we used, how do we know that they would have been effective? And being effective, would that not signify that they were too mean?

The "nice" category is also properly bisected by "costs something" and "costs nothing".

The things that are nice and cost nothing, I trust we've already tried. Oh, we haven't? You've had 100 days. Put up or shut up. The only possible explanation, then, is that this category of things that cost nothing and are nice takes longer than 100 days to produce results. I posit that there are terrorists targeting the United States with action plans taking less than 100 days to implement.

The things that cost us something can be summarized as bargaining with terrorists.

So the official position of the Obama Adminstruation is that it's better to bargain with terrorists than to waterboard them.

Just so we're clear.


P.S.: Gibbs is now tacitly admitting that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to these prisoners. Otherwise, we would not be able to question them at all.

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More Proof Robert Reich is an Idiot

As if more proof were required to verify his status as world-class moron, Robert Reich provides it:

We're in a deepening recession, in case you hadn't noticed. The biggest challenge is to ramp up aggregate demand. Yes, we have to borrow lots from the Chinese and Japanese to do this, and, yes, it's costly in terms of additional interest payments to them. But there's no choice. In fact, if the slump gets worse -- and I have every reason to fear it will because that's the direction we're heading in as fast as you can imagine -- we'll probably have to have a second stimulus. And if the second isn't enough, a third. And so on. FDR's biggest mistake was doing too little until World War II. (No one should interpret this as a recommendation for more military spending -- I'm just saying Obama will probably have to think and do much bigger than the $787 billion stimulus so far.)

Shorter Reich: A never works, B has worked before, and there is no C. Let's do A.

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I Stand With Israel

American and European liberals are of course complaining about Israel's attempt to root out the terrorists in Gaza. The response is "disproportional", they say.

But while that implicitly acknowledges that Israel is defending itself (being in response to mortar attacks by Palestinians against civilian Israeli targets), it also presupposes that a response must be proportional. Why?

War is not about fairness. War is about defeating the enemy so thoroughly that he gives up and admits he was wrong to attack you in the first place. It's about discrediting him with a giant argumentum ad baculum, the appeal to force, because none of your valid arguments appear to work. Like all such appeals, it must be accompanied by the valid arguments or it will not prevail.

Because while the appeal to force and its direct application in the form of military attack is not a reasoned argument, it is not an invalidating one. That is, the application of force doesn't mean the side using it disproves its point; it simply doesn't prove it.

In practical terms, the use of force will fail as long as the opponent fails to internalize defeat. If reason is on his side, he will fail to be defeated, no matter how badly he's beaten on the battlefield.

The true danger therefor in the use of force is not using enough to win. And when the opponent is using it, not using force is a sign that you don't believe in your own position.

From AoSHQ:

It's been said before but it is worth repeating a thousand times: if Hamas, Hezbollah, and most of the Arab states (and Iran) laid down their weapons tomorrow and forgot about their plans to dissolve Israel, there would be peace in the Middle East. The Israelis could forget about the fences and the Palestinians might one day have something approximating a Western standard of living. On the other hand, if Israel laid down its weapons tomorrow, the country would be utterly annihilated, the Israelis killed to the last man, woman, and child.

- Gabriel Malor

------------------
Update (20081229 0848): Dore Gold of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs does a more thorough job of defeating "proportionality":

To expect Israel to hold back in its use of decisive force against legitimate military targets in Gaza is to condemn it to a long war of attrition with Hamas.

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A Sudden Discovery of the Obvious

While Dan Collins doesn't say it, a study showing that people incompetent in some area believe themselves highly skilled while the truly skilled think themselves less so shows two things.

1. Cognitive psychologists tend to overestimate the importance of their findings
   
   
2. Cognitive psychologists have proved that self-esteem is overrated

In war, as in chess, he who underestimates his enemy overestimates his life expectancy.

In addition to the foregoing, I feel compelled to note that this is a classic case of the difficulty of determining cause and effect. Do the unskilled overestimate their ability, or do people who think their skills are pretty good feel no need to improve them? Perhaps it's both.

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Roger Simon: Logic-challenged

At Politico:

I do not understand why some people are opposed to a $25 billion government bailout of the U.S. auto industry.

The price is cheap. That $25 billion represents less than three months of the cost of the Iraq war.

I oppose the bailout because unlike national defense, propping up certain industries is not an area in which the government should involve itself.

By analogy, Mr. Simon suggests that because a couple buys a car with a payment of $300/month, neither partner should object to using a home equity line of credit to buy $900 worth of crack cocaine.

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Will Someone Please Tell Robert Reich That He Is An Idiot?

Floundering in dizzying circles at TPM, Robert Reich says:

Absent consumer spending, businesses are not going to invest.

That is his full argument, minus an authority appeal or three in the attempt at explaining basic Keynesian economics, followed by some wishful swiping at straw men.

Businesses invest because that is what they do if they have money left over after paying their bills, labor, and taxes. They invest in the expectation of making a profit.

Reich does what is his apparent best to come up with arguments against some kind of new-New-Deal-bailout-f0r-everyone, and says that there are only two such (emphasis added):

Expect two sorts of arguments against this. The first will come from fiscal hawks who claim that the government is already spending way too much. Even without a new stimulus package, next year's budget deficit could run over a trillion dollars, given the amounts to be spent bailing out Wall Street and perhaps the auto industry, and providing extended unemployment insurance and other measures to help those in direct need. The hawks will argue that the nation can't afford giant deficits, especially when baby boomers are only a few years away from retiring and claiming Social Security and Medicare.

They're wrong. Government spending that puts people back to work and invests in the future productivity of the nation is exactly what the economy needs right now. Deficit numbers themselves have no significance. The pertinent issue is how much underutilized capacity exists in the economy. When there's lots of idle capacity, deficit spending is entirely appropriate, as John Maynard Keynes taught us. Moving the economy to fuller capacity will of itself shrink future deficits.

So it's economic growth based on government spending, an economic five year plan without a specified time frame.

More pointedly, the dubious Keynesian belief that government spending generates revenue obscures a key detail: it depends what you spend the money on.

Because you'll get more of whatever you fund and less of what you tax. Pay people to sit around, and more will sit around. Pay them to have bad mortgages, and more will enter into foolish mortgages. Pay them to go to college, more will.

Also, even granting, for the sake of argument, that government spending will increase tax revenue, it stands to reason that some areas of spending would be more efficient at increasing that revenue; indeed, one can accept the notion that some government spending helps the economy more to produce revenue while other spending helps less.

Building a bridge over some river makes trade possible over the river, even as it puts the ferryman out of work. On balance, some amount of bridge-building is in the long run positive in almost every way. That doesn't mean we need to have a bridge within walking distance anywhere on every river, however, since after a certain point there is no advantage in having more.

But paying people money directly is the worst sort of expenditure. For every person delivered from homelessness into productivity by a government check, another (or a dozen or a hundred others) will cash the check and demand the next one, so they don't have to pay their own mortgages. It's a giant money pit, throwing the maximum investment at the minimum return. When such spending is done with borrowed money, compound interest paid on it will soon dominate.

The second argument will come from conservative supply-siders who will call for income-tax cuts rather than spending increases. They'll claim that individuals with more money in their pockets will get the economy moving again more readily than can government. They're wrong, for three reasons. First, income-tax cuts go mainly to upper-income people who tend to save rather than spend. Most Americans pay more in payroll taxes than in income taxes. Second, even if a rebate could be fashioned, people tend to use those extra dollars to pay off their debts rather than buy new goods and services, as we witnessed a few months ago when the government sent out rebate checks. Third, even when individuals purchase goods and services, those purchases tend not to generate as many American jobs as government spending on the same total scale because much of what consumers buy comes from abroad.

The insipidity here is breathtaking. The highlighted sentence in particular marks Reisch as a fraud, because saving money is a good thing. Where do people save money? Either in banks or in investments. Money saved in a bank allows the bank to lend money -- precisely as Reisch would have them do.

And what does he conclude after his violation of the rules of logic? That government must spend, spend, spend.

Which, oddly enough, is always what he concludes.

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Assimilist

Michelle Malkin reports receiving the following email from an Obamunist:

My sympathies. I did some research, and you are exactly what I thought - an assimilist with no knowledge of themselves. What a hater! You attract minions of jealous non-thinkers. Thank you for making me proud to have voted for Obama.

A person's ancestry matters only to geneologists and racists, though I don't mean to tar one with the brush of the other. The idea that a person must cling to the culture of her parents is so illiberal as to be its antithesis.

By the way, Michelle, I think assimilist is code for 'Uncle Tom'.

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Barack the Sophist Makes Personal Attack on Everyone

Quoth The One, alias Barack the Taxer:

"The reason that we want to do this, change our tax code, is not because I have anything against the rich. I love rich people! I want all of you to be rich. Go for it. That’s the America dream, that’s the American way, that’s terrific...

"John McCain and Sarah Palin they call this socialistic. You know I don’t know when, when they decided they wanted to make a virtue out of selfishness."

In the first place, Barack the Insufferable Sophist misrepresents both his opponent's position and his own. He has repeatedly railed against "tax cuts for the rich". His case has been one of playing the dissatisfaction and envy of those who have less against those who have more. He knows he isn't going to make anyone rich by giving them $500 or $1000 of someone else's money. The point is "fairness", not the creation of wealth, and it makes a lie out of your claim to love the rich.

It would be far too cynical a reading of that statement to accept it in the only sense in which it could be true. Barack the Five Year Planner wants everyone to be rich so that he can tax them all.

But in the end it isn't to make someone rich that Barack the Disingenuous Windbag wishes to give them money; it's to make them dependent. Wealth comes from risk and work, and there is neither risk nor work when people vote themselves mammon from the treasury. There is only abuse of the democracy for the purpose of gaining and maintaining power.

Taking money from one group and giving it to another is socialistic. It just is.

Giving out checks is not the way to get people "rich", even as Barack the Slider variously tries to redefine richness down from $250,000 to whatever figure he needs at the moment. If by some perverted definition of richness he claims that he is bringing wealth to those who don't have it, he is engaging in a get rich quick scheme.

People get rich on their own, when the grubby little hands of government are kept out of their pockets.

But then comes the insult: Barack the Weasel implies that anyone who doesn't want to give him money to give to others is "selfish".

Government is not the best judge of how I should use my money. I am. Without Barack the Thief's stinking taxes, I would be in a much better position to give to others.

Barack the Tempter is urging others to be envious. Envy is a vice, not a virtue, and those who encourage others in vice bring peril on themselves. Better to have a millstone tied around one's neck, in fact. As Jeremiah Wright would say, "That's in the Bible."

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Obama: Communists Are The Nice People

Barack Obama is trying to divert attention from his collectivist economic policies through his usual redefinition+strawman tactic. Noting that John McCain and Joe "the Plumber" Wurzelbacher called his wealth-spreading ideas "socialism", Obama complains joyfully:

"By the end of the week, he'll be accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten. I shared my peanut butter and jelly sandwich."

No one gets called a communist for sharing their own resources, something Barack Obama does not in fact do (unless it's for his own benefit).

Kindergarten communists share other people's toys, and other people's lunch money. Barack the Spreader wants to share other people's wealth.

If the shoe fits....

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Lest we forget what else the LA Times brought us ...

Barack, the Magic Negro.

I'd never read that March, 2008 article by David Ehrenstein before. I had assumed it was a mere puff piece on Obama. Instead, it was a patently offensive smear on all white people as closet racists. Speaking of the Magical Negro type in the movies and American culture:

He's there to assuage white "guilt" (i.e., the minimal discomfort they feel) over the role of slavery and racial segregation in American history, while replacing stereotypes of a dangerous, highly sexualized black man with a benign figure for whom interracial sexual congress holds no interest.

Listing inoffensive black actors such as Sidney Poitier and Morgan Freeman, Ehrenstein concludes that this pattern and the popularity of the type must mean that whites hunger for such a type to ease their guilt.

But the logic isn't there. Just because a series of similar characters appears in popular films doesn't mean there is a hunger for its type. As a counterpoint, consider the decision faced by the screenwriter, director, and others involved in the film. Should the character be black or white? Should they tailor the script to the actor, or pick the actor based on the script? In designing the film, should they have the character be aggressively sexual, and if so, how does that affect the plot?

It's a lot more complicated than some imaginary racialist conspiracy.

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But Colin Powell Vouched ForTed Stevens

Leon H. Wolf notes at Redstate that Colin Powell testified on behalf of convicted falsifier of forms Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AL).

How could Stevens possibly have been a felonious liar, if Colin Powell vetted him?

Indeed, how can it be that Valerie Plame was "outed" by Powell's subordinate, while Powell stood by and watched as the White House was investigated?

And he endorsed Barack Obama.

Character judge: FAIL.

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Who Injected Race Into This Campaign?

Barack Obama did, that's who.

When the jarring, hate-filled sermons of Jeremiah Wright (popup warning) were revealed, by which sermons Obama claims in his books to have been led to Christian faith, he gave a laggard response, followed by a speech on race.

But while we all enjoyed hearing from him on the subject, the question wasn't how he felt about race relations in America. The question was why he spent 20 years listening to sermons about the government inventing AIDS to kill black people.

In a June campaign rally in Florida, Obama said

They are going to try and make you afraid of me. They’re gunna say you know what he’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. Did I mention he’s Black!

No one was mentioning that. It's irrelevant, except to Obama's supporters. Perhaps that's because the candidate himself has been blaming his lack of unanimous support not on the undeniable fact that he's a Marxist, but on supposed provincial attitudes, including racism (my emphasis):

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not."

"And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

By proclaiming in his Berlin speech that "I know that I don’t look like the Americans who’ve previously spoken in this great city", he was injecting race, and intentionally.

There have been boatloads of stories and opinion pieces published saying that if Obama loses, it will be because of some white people can't bring themselves to vote for a black one. That argument is garbage: there is a small, tiny percentage of whites who won't vote for a non-white, but there is an order of magnitude more people voting for Obama because of his race.

Furthermore, it's a false dichotomy to say (as Jack Cafferty did in the link above) that either people want to elect Barack Obama, or they are against him because he's black. There are plenty of reasons to be against Barack Obama.

I will not stand down in the face of such an argument.

Obama's apologists are quick to cry "Racism!" whenever he's criticized, even when the charge has nothing to do with race and everything to do with politics.

Yet apart from his profound lack of qualification for the Presidency, Obama's skin color is the only thing that makes this campaign "historic". Why do people say, with some truth, that it would be wonderful, "historic", "powerful symbolism" for an African-American to be elected President, and then in the next sentence deny disingenuously that race is a motivating factor in their favor of Obama? Why is it okay to say that Obama's nomination is "historic", and yet deny that people want to see history made?

I, too, think it would be good to have a black man as President — just not this black man.

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The Most Poisonous Well in History

For all the talk of his "historical" campaign, Barack Obama has shown perhaps his greatest skill at poisoning the well. In June at a campaign stop in Florida, Obama said:

They are going to try and make you afraid of me. They’re gunna say you know what he’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. Did I mention he’s Black!

The only one talking about race is Obama.

Again on the campaign trail on Monday, October 20, Obama said:

In the final days of campaigns, the say-anything, do-anything politics too often takes over. We've seen it before and we're seeing it again — ugly phone calls, misleading mail, misleading TV ads, careless, outrageous comments.

Victor Davis Hanson notes that Obama has spent more money on negative ads than anyone in history, and has stood silent while high-profile supporters or campaign create misleading TV ads, and carefully crafted and targeted outrageous comments.

But this hypocrisy is not the real point. The point is that Obama has made a pattern of denouncing attacks that haven't come. It also characterizes all phone calls, all mail, all TV ads, and all comments made by his opponents as desperation. Never mind the facts or evidence of Obama's lack of readiness to be President.

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I Crave the Words of Josh Treviño

I sometimes get a little thrill up my leg, even, as he breaks down some issue with his preternatural insight. And yet, when he writes this:

Rest assured that were I not in California, where the Republican ticket will struggle to break 40%, I would not be casting a protest vote of any sort. My vote for Bobby Jindal for President is intended as a protest to two entities: the McCain campaign, which has done a terrible job, and the national Republican party, which has done a terrible job of its own unrelated to the McCain campaign. That said, I don’t value my protest so much that I would knowingly contribute to Barack Obama’s margin of victory — so, make no mistake, were I in Nevada, Virginia, Indiana, or any other contested state, I would vote for the McCain-Palin ticket.

I wish he would read this:

When my girlfriend shows up for a date dressed in a particularly awful outfit, I don't say anything. I just hope for the best. At that point in the evening, I don't see any other viable options.

Or perhaps, if I could summon the temerity, this:

The election process is about more than just who wins. Sure, the winner is important, but there are other factors that have an impact on the behavior of government. For the sake of discussion, let's assume that one of the two major parties, or one of the two main contenders in a primary, will win the election. Why vote for someone else?

That piece was written in the context of third party candidates, but the logic applies here to urge the very course of action Josh has taken. Bobby Jindal, or some other True Conservative, fulfills the role of the third party for Treviño in this election. Apparently he finds persuasive the same reasoning needed to tilt against the two-party windmill.

I can understand it, on an intellectual level, but I suppose I'd have to live in California to really get it.

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Why Ayers Matters

Now that I no longer care who wins the upcoming presidential election between John McCain and Barack Obama, there are only a few reasons for me to blog on it.

One of those reasons is bad logic.

There are many who will see the McCain campaign highlighting the Obama-Ayers connection as mere guilt-by-association. We know that, logically speaking, associating with evil doesn't make one evil. Even if Ayers were evil, merely associating with him doesn't in and of itself make Barack Obama evil.

However, there is much more to the relationship than that. The two have known each other for years, perhaps since Obama was an undergraduate student. Ayers hired Obama to distribute between $50 and $150 million for selling anti-capitalism in the Chicago public schools. You don't hire someone to give away that kind of money unless the two of you are in sync and believe in the same goals. There is clear evidence that Obama and Ayers are cut of the same political cloth.

But when Hillary Clinton brought the subject up at a debate during the Democratic primaries, Obama said that Ayers was "just a guy who lives in my neighborhood." He lied about the relationship.

But here's the thing: Ayers was a terrorist as a young man, setting bombs in the Pentagon, at police stations, and in the home of a judge in the attempt to influence a trial. He has never repented of these actions, saying he wishes he'd done more. Obama should not have worked for him, but he did. And now he wants out of that decision.

So he says that Ayers was fire-bombing judges' homes with their children asleep in bed while he, Obama, was only eight years old, so it doesn't matter.

It's an exercise in non sequitur. The issue is not how old Obama was when Ayers did his evil; the issue is that Obama shares this guy's views and helped him spend money to promote those views. And then he lied about it.

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Without Preconditions

Ace quotes the Obama web site as saying that Obama "supports direct, Presidential-level talks with Iran without preconditions".

The problem is not, and has never been, meeting with our enemies, friends, or neutral countries.

The problem is not, and has never been, meeting at the appointee level without preconditions.

The problem is not, and has never been, meeting with our foes at the Presidential level.

The problem is meeting at the Presidential level without preconditions. Obama always tries to weasel, putting forth the straw man argument that Henry Kissinger supports meeting without preconditions, but fails to mention that he supports that only at the surrogate level.

The Obama campaign is fond of noting that the Bush Administration has met with Iran, so it's OK if Obama and Ahmadinejad do. But they fail to note that it is not President Bush himself, but lower-level officials, who attend the meeting.

I don't think we should meet with Iran at all, unless it's to accept their unconditional surrender. You don't negotiate with terrorists.

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A Dark Fortnight for Moneychangers

To save the financial system, the government took it over.

Ironically, the financial crisis was caused by the government. Banks were forced (by liberal banking regulations) to sell mortgages to people who could not pay their bills. Oddly enough, many of those loans resulted in foreclosure.

The argument for forcing the banks to provide the loans is simple: get more people in houses, since homeowners are more stable economically. And it's politically popular to encourage home ownership, a symbol of success in America.

The first trouble with that is the usual liberal sloppy logic: just because owners of homes are more responsible and successful economically doesn't mean that making someone a homeowner will make them more responsible or successful. The part that makes a person responsible is having skin in the game: if you work hard to get something, you're more likely to work hard to keep it. Working hard means, among other things, living within your means. People who save for a down payment have shown they have what it takes to continue that lifestyle.

The second, and equally big trouble with forcing banks to make unsafe loans is that it artificially increases housing values, both for houses and for apartments. It's simple economics: more buyers means higher prices. In seeking to make loans easily available to marginal buyers, Congressional liberals ensured that everyone would be paying more for housing.

Loan availability should be based on the ability to repay, not simply on possession of a heartbeat.

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McCain Lead Mystifies HuffPo Blogger

Writing at the Huffington Post, Adam McCay is perplexed at why the addition of Sarah Palin has given John McCain such a huge polling bump.

I was going to go through all of the points he makes and deal with them individually, but I decided to do a shorter me: if your logic is valid and leads to a false conclusion, then at least one of your premises is incorrect.

The details are left as an exercise for the reader.

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What the Democratic Party Should Do

When Democrats talk about Obama, they should focus on him as the fulfillment of Dr. King's Dream.

But really, they should quit talking about Obama. Talk instead about health care, the environment, the economy, and that kind of thing. Domestic stuff.

And they should put the blame for the price of oil on the war in Iraq.

They've been blaming oil companies and speculators, and now would have a hard time switching gears and making it stick. O'course, the MSM would pass the story along. But if they'd starting saying "See what happens when you start wars?" when oil hit $90/bbl, they'd own both issues now. They could have people convinced that we may have won the war, but at a cost of $4 gasoline.

(It's not logical to blame the price of oil on the war in Iraq, but since the speculators are sensitive to Iran's threats to blow up Israel, and Iran is fighting us in Iraq, it makes enough sense that some people would swallow it. That may be enough to allow people to ignore the Democrats long-standing refusal to allow more domestic oil production).

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Barack Obama and the False Dilemma

We don't need to drill for more oil, he says, we just need properly inflated tires.

Why not both?

It takes zero effort on the part of oil producers for me to inflate my tires. It takes zero effort on my part
for them to drill for oil.

All it takes is for Barack Obama to get out of their way.

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