Convoluted Argument of the Day Award
Posted on June 25th, 2009
by Freddy Gray |
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From la Frum:
I’ll be curious to see whether one - just one! - of the many media sources that have condemned the Bush administration’s terrorist surveillance program will deplore the publication by Reuters of Mark Sanford’s love e-mails. What on earth does the publication of this embarrassing and hurtfully intimate material add to a story that was already plain enough?
Now my brain is not as sharp as the perspicacious David Frum’s, and one perhaps should support an attempt to sympathize with the embattled Governor. But this attempt to conflate two different issues under a relevant news angle is completely warped. Is he saying that you can’t dispute a government policy of intruding on the privacy of citizens, unless you acknowledge that the media intrudes on the private lives of men in office?
Or is Frum just wildly throwing misshaped stones at the media’s bias? If so, that makes him rather similar to a man he likes to disparage, Rush Limbaugh.
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http://www.newsweek.com/id/188279/page/2
(3rd paragraph)
David Frum said: “Notice that Limbaugh did not say: “I hope the administration’s liberal plans fail.” Or (better): “I know the administration’s liberal plans will fail.” Or (best): “I fear that this administration’s liberal plans will fail, as liberal plans usually do.” If it had been phrased that way, nobody could have used Limbaugh’s words to misrepresent conservatives as clueless, indifferent or gleeful…”
Of course that was a untrue, and that *is exactly* what Limbaugh said. He carefully explained to Hannity that that was *exactly* what he meant:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,525077,00.html
LIMBAUGH: “No, I don’t back away from anything I’ve said about President Obama and his policies and his plans. I don’t know him personally. I don’t wish him ill as a human being. But he’s my president. He’s all of our president. His ideas and his policies matter.”
People who hate Limbaugh presumably are motivated by the fear of seeing conservatives congregate anywhere, for any reason. They don’t like conservatives who advance ideas, they don’t like conservative *movements*.
Find more than half a million conservatives getting together, and you will find some *superior “conservative”* denigrating that group, or it’s leader. We can find you a consistant example, even here on TAC, if you need.
A conservative will say, “Here is what I wish they would do, or here is my plan”.
A conservative pretender will insult, trying to create a caracature (a hallmark of the *left*), rather than argue substance.
And yet:
http://www.newmajority.com/ShowScroll.aspx?ID=0741c20a-c039-495c-b066-65ee12a668e1
I wonder if we are reading what Frum said wrongly. Where does he say we need to feel sympathy? Where does he say “media intrudes”?
Doesn’t he say, rather, that the left are hypocritical about “privacy rights”, and will use same when it suits their agenda, even when there is no apparant need to have done so?
Frum asks,
As if every scandal were as self-explanatory as all that, as if people don’t sometimes confess to part of their wrongdoing in hopes that the rest will avoid detection, as if the public didn’t have a right to relevant information about how a public servant uses State property and why.
Had this affair not happened, and had Sanford the real conservative become a contender in 2012, one can already envision the slings and arrows that the center-right neocon Frum would have sent his way during the primaries. Now that Sanford is neutralized politically, Frum can swoop in and “defend” him.
Behaving as Sanford has means being unable to choose one’s friends and defenders, though.
I still think a great deal of him. He’s done an awful thing, and maybe his career deserves to end over it, but he got a lot of things right, too.