Quite Contrary
Andrew Gelman asks:
This brings me to a research question: is contrarian-ness on the increase, or have pundits been doing this sort of thing forever? All someone needs to do is come up with a good measure for it and go through the right database and find out the answer. I really feel like the op-eds have become more contrarian in recent decades. Probably this is impossible to measure, but if anyone has a good idea, go for it!
My strong sense is that contrarianness reached its apogee in the 1990s when a general sense took over that politics was basically silly and that punditry should be seen as basically akin to the college debate circuit wherein the idea is to construct the most clever possible argument rather than to actually hit on the truth. When this general spirit of the times merged with the elite press’ inexplicable loathing of Al Gore you started getting really bizarre arguments being made with a straight face. People would say that one good thing about George W. Bush was that he was dimwitted, which made him understand leadership. Or that a big problem with Gore was that he was interested in public policy.
This attitude brought us thousands of Americans killed in a terrorist attack, thousands more killed in a senseless war, and eventually the collapse of the world economy. But that in turn has at least to a small extent reminded people that it actually does matter what happens and who’s right.
87 Responses to “Quite Contrary”
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July 8th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
By the end of the 1990s, the American people also had the attitude that the United States was basically fool-proof, that the tides of history were all pulling in our favor and nothing could stop them. Boy were we wrong.
July 8th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
Contrarianism is the root of all evil? Uh, alright.
July 8th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
Gore’s unforgivable sin was not to work harder to hide the fact that he was so much smarter and well-informed than the media.
And what DTM said.
July 8th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
In the sixties, which sadly I’m old enough to remember, there were plenty of pundit contrarians (contrary pundits?) who published in the Village Voice, Ramparts, Esquire, Screw, the Lampoon, etc etc. By the 90s and the dominance of 24 hour cable news programs, that energy had migrated there, and become much more prominent. As the only way most print journalists can make a good living is by becoming cable news talking heads on at least a semi-regular basis, and as the solons who run cable tv have decided that serious conversation is boring (as you say, W is more interesting than Gore to them), what we get is 24 hours of snark on all the cable networks, and that same attitude when they go back to print. (how do you let CNN know you’d be good fun on air if your writing isn’t that same good fun?) It’s also the case that forty years of nasty politics that grew out of Nixon’s southern strategy has made the Republicans incapable of and uninterested in good government, obsessed only with taking power, and that makes for a polarized political atmosphere in which a serious debate is, at least for them, beside the point. As the press takes its cue from the political establishment, the press has developed the sort of political culture only a Karl Rove or a Lee Atwater could love.
July 8th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
This attitude brought us thousands of Americans killed in a terrorist attack, thousands more killed in a senseless war, and eventually the collapse of the world economy.
Rather than “brought us,” say “contributed to getting,” just to head off criticisms like Brent’s. To any election as close and muddled as the 2000 presidential election, there were many contributing factors, and the substitution of contrarianism for insight was surely one of them. Myself, I’d rank it behind what DTM said but still ahead of the work of any three political/media consultants.
July 8th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
YGLESIAS…I think I will continue to post this in the comments of all of your posts until an apology appears on this blog.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124699072588807121.html
July 8th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
thousands more killed in a senseless war…
…that Matt Yglesias ardently supported.
July 8th, 2009 at 2:12 pm
I am NOT a W fan … and I did vote for Gore … and I agree with the implied point on Iraq but …
“This attitude brought us thousands of Americans killed in a terrorist attack, ….”
HUH???
Does anyone REALLY think 9/11 wouldn’t have happened if Gore had been elected?? Or that press or pundit attitudes had one skillionth of a whillimeter of impact on the underlying probabilities behind that attack?????
That’s … well it wouldn’t be polite to say what that is … don’t go overboard dude.
July 8th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
Does anyone REALLY think 9/11 wouldn’t have happened if Gore had been elected?
Under Gore, maybe it wouldn’t have happened. Under W, it was bound to happen, because Bush and Cheney had no interest in terrorism at all and despite all the warnings, before 9/11 Bush spent all his time in his ranch and Cheney was already preparing the invasion of Iraq.
July 8th, 2009 at 2:21 pm
I also agree with DTM — in fact, I think “contrarianism” as such isn’t so much the problem* as the motives behind it, how it fits into the overall spirit of the discussion.
*I think there’s something to be said for arguing against an opinion, prevailing or otherwise, for the sake of making it. If we are, as a society, really interested in the pursuit of truth, it will come about only through frequent debate.
July 8th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
Jeff @6:
If you read your link, it should be clear that no apology is needed, or even warranted. Palin said that we shouldn’t “second-guess” Israeli security decisions. In other words, we should just give them carte blanche to do whatever the hell they feel like. That’s a dangerous and naive position, especially considering that our military aid is the only reason they can even contemplate such barbarously aggressive policies.
What Biden said is that we cannot “dictate” the policy of another sovereign nation, even one with whom we are so extensively linked. However, if you read the full transcript of his remarks, it is clear that, while we cannot dictate policy, we can strongly condemn it, and that such actions as an air-strike on Iran could jeopardize our continued support for the Israeli government.
If you can’t tell the difference between those two positions, then you have no business commenting on foreign policy.
July 8th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
Why oh why:
nder Gore, maybe it wouldn’t have happened. Under W, it was bound to happen, because Bush and Cheney had no interest in terrorism at all and despite all the warnings, before 9/11 Bush spent all his time in his ranch and Cheney was already preparing the invasion of Iraq.
You’re insane.
July 8th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
This brings me to a research question: is contrarian-ness on the increase, or have pundits been doing this sort of thing forever?
What’s contrarian-ness mean? What’s the definition. If it’s what Mickey Kaus does I don’t see any increase.
I really feel like the op-eds have become more contrarian in recent decades.
I don’t see that at all. I see bloggers like Gellman stretching for something to write about.
July 8th, 2009 at 2:30 pm
My perception about public discourse in the 90s agrees with Matt’s. Part of the problem may be that Kinsley was a pretty good editor at TNR, and for people in several different publications seemed to be trying to recapture those glory days. I don’t know. But anyway, public discourse in the 90s definitely did feel like “college debate.”
July 8th, 2009 at 2:32 pm
Are you saying that a culture of contrarianism led all of Washington DC to support the invasion of Iraq? Obviously not–what you’re describing is sophistry.
July 8th, 2009 at 2:33 pm
Steve,
Read Richard Clarke’s Against All Enemies and get back to us on your snark about 9/11. Our top counter-terrorism expert, and the man who was in charge of the bin Laden task-force certainly thinks that different leadership would have made all the difference.
Remember, Clinton had Clarke draw up a plan to get bin Laden following the Cole attack, and Bush shelved that plan, not even holding a cabinet-level meeting about terrorism until the early days of September, at which point it was too late.
Repeat after me: Bush was responsible for 9/11,* and keep repeating it until it sinks in, because it’s the reality of the situation. I’m not saying he wanted it to happen, just that he dropped the ball and thousands of Americans have paid the price.
Oh, what was Gore’s attitude about terrorism? According to Clarke and several other Clinton officials, when asked what he thought we should do about al Qaida in a planning session held in the wake of the Cole attack, his response was, “I say we get those fuckers”
*-Note, I am not advocating an “inside-job” conspiracy, so don’t even try to suggest it–I’m no Trufer, just someone who’s read extensively on our counter-terrorism efforts both pre- and post-9/11.
July 8th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
I just read a Huffpo piece equating the choosing of Edwards in 2004 and Palin in 2008 as VP candidates. Does that help you see what contrariness might mean? Or is it merely trying to think up something to write so you’ll be published?
July 8th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
YGLESIAS…I think I will continue to post this in the comments of all of your posts until an apology appears on this blog.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124699072588807121.html
Jeff, Matt’s busy right now, but he has authorized me to apologize on his behalf for the Wall Street Journal article to which you linked. I probably should have mis-spelled something in the apology for authenticity’s sake, but it’s too much work.
July 8th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
Repeat after me: Bush was responsible for 9/11,* and keep repeating it until it sinks in, because it’s the reality of the situation. I’m not saying he wanted it to happen, just that he dropped the ball and thousands of Americans have paid the price.
Maybe you’re not a Truther but you’re just as insane as one. You bend everything into a partisan outlook.
July 8th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
YGLESIAS…I think I will continue to post this in the comments of all of your posts until an apology appears on this blog.
You go girl! Fight the man!
July 8th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
It’s beyond debate that Bush significantly reduced the efforts being put into counter-terrorism upon taking office.
His Attorney General took FBI agents off of counter-terror to free up manpower for obscenity prosecutions.
He named Kremlinologist his National Security Advisor.
He demoted the interagency Director of Counterterrorism from the cabinet to subcabinet level.
He responded to the report about al Qaeda’s responsibility for the Cole bombing by 1) doing nothing and 2) believing his Saudi buddies, who blamed it on Iran.
No one can say for sure whether this reduced focus on the problem is the reason why the 9/11 plot wasn’t discovered, but there can be no dispute that the issue of terrorism, and of al Qaeda in particular, was given a lot less attention in the eight months leading up to 9/11 than in the years before.
July 8th, 2009 at 2:48 pm
Poptarts, you need to inform yourself before commenting on subjects you know nothing about. I suggest you start with ‘The Dark Side’ and ‘Angler’.
The Bush-Cheney regime had a few meetings before 9/11 to discuss invading Iraq; zero on terrorism and AlQaeda before early September, way too late.
Gore wouldn’t have done that. He was well aware of the danger of terrorism since the first WTC bombing.
July 8th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
The best analogy I’ve ever read about 9/11 (I don’t remember who said it first) was this one:
World Series ties 2-2, it’s the seventh inning of Game Five of the world series, and the home team is trailing 4-2 with runners on first and second with one out.
At the plate is the team’s catcher, an awful hitter who hit .220 on the season and is 4 for 36 in the postseason. Predictably, he grounds into a double play.
As it happens, the team goes quietly in the eighth and ninth, loses the game 4-2, and goes on to lose game six going away.
Looking back, the manager probably thinks “I wish I had realized what a pivotal situation that was and substituted a better hitter.”
Of course the catcher didn’t lose the team the series – so many factors were at work. But the manager isn’t wrong to wish someone better had been at the plate when it mattered most.
July 8th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
“Does anyone REALLY think 9/11 wouldn’t have happened if Gore had been elected?”
It’s the wrong question. It’s not so much that Gore might have made a difference, which we know W did NOT. The really useful thing is to recognize that it IS hindsight — and ask, realistically, what could have been done (and why would anyone have done it) to stop 9-11 after it was planned but before it happened?
Thinking about it that way reveals a lot that we do know.
For one thing, the principal Bush failure to prevent 9-11 was a lack of imagination: W simply couldn’t imagine the attack, nor that any Clinton holdover/professional had anything useful to say, viz the “okay, you’ve covered your ass now” treatment of those who finally did get in to warn him, on August 6.
Taking their cue from the President, Bush’s staff — starting with Condaleeza Rice — refused to imagine how bin Laden would attack us: since nobody gave us the plans ahead of time, they figure they were absolved of any responsibility to have stopped what they could not know.
It’s not so much to say that Gore WOULD have done something to stop it, as to ask just what he COULD have done that might have worked, since he presumably wouldn’t have had any more or different information than W did have.
The truly useful ‘contrarian’ thing would be to note that, right next to the Bush adminsitration’;s failure of imagination, is a simple lack of direction. It’s not hard to imagine how a different approach would have had a shot at stopping bin Laden: instead of waiting for an attack (or hoping for intelligence to reveal a plot), why not assign somebody to figure out how it could be done?
Clarke and others (including Rice) have noted that a key failure was the inability to make a connection between hijacking and suicide bombing. It’s pretty revealing for what was evidently never part of the analysis — nobody was ever assigned to THINK like terrorists.
Hijackings had always been for ransom, for publicity, e.g., “take me to Cuba”. When they thought about terrorists hijacking passenger airliners, they kept wondering how they’d get the bombs on the plane.
Nobody ever thought — gee, an airliner fueled to fly cross country IS the bomb. I think that’s cuz nobody was ever given the assignment to be a sort Muslim extremist MacGyver.
It’s pretty silly to make this personal beyond assigning responsibility and thus, blame to Bush and his guys, because this happened on their watch. But hindsight has value — and it’s useful to think, BECAUSE it’s hindsight, just what could have been done that might be worth doing next time…
… and that’s as true for the commentariat as for anybody else.
July 8th, 2009 at 3:01 pm
“All right, you’ve covered your ass now.” -Bush, re: Aug. 6 PDB warning about Al Qaeda’s plans to that came to fruition on 9/11. Yes, tell me more about how Gore would have been just as bad, please.
July 8th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
How did a post on contrarianism become a thread on 9/11?
July 8th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
The Bush-Cheney regime had a few meetings before 9/11 to discuss invading Iraq; zero on terrorism and AlQaeda before early September, way too late.
Gore wouldn’t have done that. He was well aware of the danger of terrorism since the first WTC bombing.
Bush was in office 8 months. The CIA SUCKED at their job. Clinton did little to help that. The FBI SUCKED at their job. They fought childish turf wars with each other and wouldn’t share any info. The CIA and FBI failed us.
Conservatives blame Clinton but I don’t. And I don’t blame Bush either.
Repeat after me: Bush was in office for eight months. If Gore had been President the right wing would have gone insane in the membrane blaming him, but I wouldn’t have.
Look at this way, if Gore had been President he never would have grown a beard and become a fatass and declared jihad on global warming thereby saving the planet. What’s more important in the long run?
July 8th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
The Internet has increased the value of contrarian punditry. On the Internet, the key to readership is to induce a reader to click a link. This created an incentive for eye-catching, even bizarre-seeming links. The kind that make a reader say, “How can that possibly be argued?” This dynamic makes contrarian headlines more valuable and has led to their proliferation.
In my view, Slate pioneered this, especially but not limited to Mickey Kaus. I think contrarianism is in its golden age, which is unfortunatley because most contrarian positions are completely fatuous.
July 8th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
The at bottom reason for contrarionism is that pundits or MSM in general aren’t smart enough to do better. One isn’t going to hear an intelligent discussion of say financial regulation from the MSM since anything that requires the ability to count past the number of fingers on their hands really cannot be discussed by 98+% of the reporters/pundits covering the govt. They all can understand a sex scandal though.
So what you get is a soap opera called ‘Washington DC’, kind of like ‘Dallas’ except the characters are obviously different. That’s the best they can do, and a good soap needs ‘contrarianism’ in order to inject some drama.
July 8th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Nobody ever thought — gee, an airliner fueled to fly cross country IS the bomb.
Um. When did the Simpson’s episode air wherein Side Show Bob commandeers an old biplane to crash into the emergency broadcasting station that Krusty was using to broadcast his show?
Also, what about Samuel Byck?
I guess in both of those cases, the hijacked/commandeered plane was not being used for terrorism so much as for a targeted assassination, but one certainly could not claim that the idea of hijacking a plane and flying it into a building to cause death(s) was inconceivable until 9/11.
July 8th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
if Gore had been President he never would have grown a beard and become a fatass and declared jihad on global warming thereby saving the planet.
No, he would’ve been in a position to actually do something about global warming, thereby saving the eight years that Bush completely wasted because fighting global warming wasn’t convenient for his oil company friends, and also because reading is hard.
Don’t you have a toaster to stick yourself into?
July 8th, 2009 at 3:31 pm
Some nice points … I have no doubt that Gore would have been a different and in my opinion better president (that’s why I voted for him) …and to be frank I’d forgoten the Bush redirect on counter-terrorism. But there is a real difference between having a differnt CT strategy and having a strategy that would have been effective … it is too much to lay the whole blame at Bush’s door … my read is that the things being considered and our attitudes were so pervasively handicapped by in the box thinking that the attack would still have gotten home. The kind of operations that have gone on the last few years (not talking Iraq here but CT) could not have been contemplated let alone carried out. Now this is the real world and it’s also possible that under Gore we would have gotten lucky and stopped it … I just don’t see anything systemic that greatly increased our chances.
July 8th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
Poptarts,
“Bush was in office for 8 months”
That’s right, I repeated it, as asked. Now, tell me one thing that he did in those 8 months that had a positive impact on our national security. I only ask, because I can think of quite a few (most already mentioned) that made us far less secure, and which directly hindered the aforementioned agencies from pursuing a useful counterterrorism strategy.
That’s not partisan, that’s the explicit conclusion of experts in the field, and was, according to the democrats on the pannel, only prevented from being the official conclusion of the 9/11 Commission by the fact that that body was chaired by Republican Thom Kean, who was one of the real partisan bad-actors.
July 8th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Steve,
Like I said, read Clarke’s book, as well as the two Cheney biog’s that were recommended. The important thing about the Clarke/Clinton strategy that was shelved by Bush was that Clarke was proposing a change from tit-for-tat air- and cruise-missile strikes in retaliation to attacks in favor of something more along the lines of our post-9/11 campaign in Afghanistan. Ie, Special Forces on the ground and naval air-power coordinating with the Northern Alliance in order to capture, kill, or disrupt the Afghan terrorist leadership.
Would that have guaranteed that the 9/11 plot would have failed? Perhaps not–the planning was already going forward in late 2000, but it almost certainly would have disrupted the ability of al Qaeda central command to direct or, more importantly, finance the operation.
Al “get those fuckers” Gore would have almost assuredly gone ahead with Clarke’s Dilenda plan (named after Rome’s total destruction of Carthage after the Punic Wars) to cut out al Qaeda at its roots, while George “ok, you’ve covered your asses” Bush pushed Clarke and counterterrorism aside in order to pursue obscenity prosecutions and missile defense.
July 8th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
No, he would’ve been in a position to actually do something about global warming, thereby saving the eight years that Bush completely wasted because fighting global warming wasn’t convenient for his oil company friends, and also because reading is hard.
Why didn’t Gore do anything during during his 8 years as Vice? Only after his career is over does he make a movie to scare the shit out of people.
You guys who blame Bush for 9/11 are suffering from Bush-hatred syndrom. It seems like you really miss him as someone to rant against.
July 8th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Poptarts:
Why is he insane? It is a demonstrated fact that the Clinton team told the incoming Bushies that Al Qaeda/terrorism would be their biggest challenge, and in their disdain-driven commitment to do the opposite of whatever the Clinton administration did, the Bushies ignored all of this and turned a blind eye.
You say that arguments like that try to force everything into a partisan framework. Actually, your arguments try to force a partisan reality into an artificially non-partisan framework. The Clinton administration took terrorism seriously; the Bush administration did not. Why deny this basic reality?
July 8th, 2009 at 3:50 pm
Poptarts, give it up. Bush didn’t cause 9/11, but his actions were certainly more helpful to it than not. But then you still think it was a peachy idea for the United States to engage in an, unprovoked, brutal war against the people of Iraq. So it would be hard to consider you a voice of reason on either of these topics.
July 8th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
Why didn’t Gore do anything during during his 8 years as Vice? Only after his career is over does he make a movie to scare the shit out of people.
Kyoto Protocol. Wiki
Do you know anything?
You guys who blame Bush for 9/11 are suffering from Bush-hatred syndrom. It seems like you really miss him as someone to rant against.
That’s fine, ignorant apologists for the Bush disasters like you are still there. You suffer from information-hatred syndrome. No matter how hard you try, you won’t convince anybody that Bush wasn’t that bad. Because we all lived through those years.
Try in 20 years. After all, it worked for Reagan among right-wing voters.
July 8th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
Again, the point isn’t to say that “Bush was in office for 8 months” (actually, more like 7 and change) as a way to blame him for failing to anticipate the unpredictable, much less to excuse him for having been there for ONLY… oh, gimme a break.
The point is to show how contrarianism OUGHT to work, and what hindsight is good for.
It’s like the guy who cited the good field/no hit catcher during the World Series analogy. One reason baseball managers keep statistics is to use past performance to determine the most likely move to produce the best outcome in any particular circumstance — leaving in a .220 hitter who is 4 for 36 in the postseason, instead of pulling him for a pinch hitter, doesn’t seem like a smart move. But it’s a bad analogy — for one thing, a catcher is a vital fielding position (”if you don’t have a catcher, there are a lot of passed balls” — Casey Stengel), and for another, that the poor hitter failed to get a hit in a crucial situation isn’t an example of getting blindsided by something you couldn’t anticipate.
So contrarian, the analogy ain’t.
To be useful, a contrarian shouldn’t be contradicting conventional wisdom for the sake of contradiction — the way many liberals blame the MSM for not liking Gore cuz he was a policy wonk, that they were being ‘contrarian’ for liking W cuz he wasn’t.
So I cited an example of contrarianism as a TECHNIQUE — okay, so we keep getting intelligence that “bin Laden is determined to strike in the United States”, and we keep hearing that we can’t possibly do anything about it because we have no intelligence that tells us just WHAT he’s going to do.
The contrarian thing to do, THEN, would be ASSIGN somebody the job of acting like bin Laden: “Okay, Farnsworth, how would YOU do it?” Like I said, if you intentionally approach hindsight with the idea that you;’re going to find out how you COULD have seen the unpredictable coming, and then figure out HOW you could have done it, you might actually learn something beyond just finger-pointing.
It’s not hard to imagine Farnsworth saying, okay — so we know they want to hit us in the US, and we know they are talking about hijacking aircraft, and they’ve already hit the World Trade Center, only with a truck, to blow it up, but gee, how could they pack explosives like that into an…. airliner fueled to fly cross country? (hand smacking forehead)
That kind of thinking is very rare in the commentariat, because it tends to be tethered to what is actually being done or debated by public officials, not what they’re NOT doing… and certainly there isn’t a lot of genuinely informed analysis based on information that independently reasons to a conclusion that reflects any judgment on elected officials that isn’t partisan.
I’m just saying that there’s a better approach to being contrarian (we can do it, this is how) than the likes of Kaus or Kinsley. (Both of whom learned from Charley Peters, who is still stuck on the dragon, the knight in shining armor, and the damsel in distress: all stories and analysis get jammed into that story template.)
July 8th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
Why didn’t Gore do anything [about global warming] during during his 8 years as Vice?
Well, the obvious reason is that until Cheney, the VP had all the political power granted to that office by the Constitution. I.e. basically none.
But of course he could have gone to his boss and said “Mr. President, we need to do something about this” (assuming that he knew about it then and didn’t just discover it later). And then Clinton would probably have reminded him that the Republicans controlled Congress for 3/4 of his term and he had a lot of other things on his plate.
In retrospect, I do wish Clinton had done more on climate change, but at the time the science wasn’t as solid and the Republicans controlled Congress. That’s a combination that would have made it rather hard for him to do much more than he did, even without all the other distractions.
In the alternate universe where Nader had a heart attack and decided to spend more time with his family, I expect President Gore *did* do something about climate change, but we can’t exactly go over there and look.
July 8th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
@39: Kamikaze tactics were not new, they were in fact almost 60 years old. Combining hijacking and kamikaze arguably *was* new; maybe it would have been figured out in time, maybe it wouldn’t. But that’s beside the point. Going after Al Qaeda *at all* might have caught some of their agents in the U.S., which could have prevented the attacks even if you *didn’t* know what their specific M.O. was going to be. Even the most creatively ingenious form of attack can’t be carried out from a prison cell.
To say that more intense counterterrorism efforts *might* have prevented 9/11 is such a weak statement it’s really surprising to see people denying it so vehemently.
July 8th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
Poptarts, give it up. Bush didn’t cause 9/11, but his actions were certainly more helpful to it than not. But then you still think it was a peachy idea for the United States to engage in an, unprovoked, brutal war against the people of Iraq. So it would be hard to consider you a voice of reason on either of these topics.
All I’m saying is that if Gore was President when it happened I wouldn’t have blamed him, as many insane Republicans – acting as you are now – would have.
The Iraq was not completely unprovoked. Saddam commited genocide against the Kurds, invaded and annexed a member of the UN and wouldn’t comply with the UN or weapons inspectors b/c he wanted to bluff Iran.
He could have not done those provacative things and probably still be in power today as you evidently wish he was.
I’ve lost all respect for anti-war types like you.
If Gore was President he probably wouldn’t have done much on global warming just as Clinton did nothing.
July 8th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
You say that arguments like that try to force everything into a partisan framework. Actually, your arguments try to force a partisan reality into an artificially non-partisan framework. The Clinton administration took terrorism seriously; the Bush administration did not. Why deny this basic reality?
Because I think in nonpartisan terms. Being partisan means whitewashing the Clinton administration’s record, like you do. They were not that good.
July 8th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
In retrospect, I do wish Clinton had done more on climate change, but at the time the science wasn’t as solid and the Republicans controlled Congress. That’s a combination that would have made it rather hard for him to do much more than he did, even without all the other distractions.
In the alternate universe where Nader had a heart attack and decided to spend more time with his family, I expect President Gore *did* do something about climate change, but we can’t exactly go over there and look.
I voted for Nader b/c I was sick of Clinton/Gore using the Republicans as an alibi. Sometime you need to do the “progressive block strategy” instead of just triangulate all the time, as they did on the environment wiht a vengeance.
July 8th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
Jeff,
Not the same. Palin thinks Israel should do what it wants, and the US should not interfere. Biden thinks Israel can do what it wants, but there are consequences.
Biden has the advantage of being right. Biden’s remarks are particularly apt considering Israel has no capacity to affect Iran’s enrichment program.
In other words, Biden said that Israel can attack Iran to no effect other than ruining their relationship with the US. They have that ability.
I haven’t looked at the other thread, but I bet what I’ve said has already been explained to you
July 8th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
LOL — ohferyinoutloud, folks continue to miss the point. If we were gonna spend time bitching about how Bush didn’t go after bin Laden’s agents in the US, somebody should note that he HIRED guys to run the INS whose claim to fame was PREVENTING a crackdown on bogus student visas.
But we were talking about contrarianism, so here is a future example.
Next spring, somebody briefs the President that Berzerkistan has figured out how to cheaply weaponize a synthetic form of smallpox. But Berzerkistan has never shown any particular interest in direct conflict with the US, and doesn’t hate Israel any more than most ’stans. All we know is that it is run by a paranoid, money-hungry dictator s– we know they have this new cheap weapon, and we don’t know what they’re going to do with it, Mr, President.
The smart contrarian approach would be active — assign somebody to act like the Berzerkistani dictator. Does he sell the stuff? To whom? Through what networks? Can WE buy any — and create the only market for it, which we just happen to control? Is that a good idea?
The more common contrarian approach would be to either 1) attack ‘em, or 2) deny that this poses any threat at all.
July 8th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
Poptarts, if Gore had been fabulously uninterested in terrorism and ignored the whole issue as well as specific warnings, than peiople would be right to blame him. He wouldn’t have been, though. Bush was, and deserves blame. Reality is partisan sometimes.
July 8th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
Poptarts wrote “I voted for Nader b/c I was…” dumber than a bag of hammers.
There, fixed it for you.
The question is, have you LEARNED anything since?
July 8th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
Why oh why:
On 12 November 1998, Vice President Al Gore symbolically signed the protocol.
He did one good thing. And it was symbolic. Big. Deal.
(makes wanking hand gesture)
July 8th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
Because I think in nonpartisan terms.
Then you are an idiot who doesn’t understand politics or history.
July 8th, 2009 at 4:45 pm
PopTard says:
“I voted for Nader”
So, not only are you a moron, but you are, in fact, one of the morons responsible for giving us the Chimp in the first place?
And you support the Iraq war?
And you think Democrats are more to blame for climate inaction than the GOP?
I’ve been trying very hard to be respectful and considerate of your opinions, but this is a deal-breaker.
Either you’re lying through your teeth and arguing in bad faith, or you can’t tell your ass from a hole in the ground.
In either case, go away and let the grown-ups have an intelligent conversation.
July 8th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
So, not only are you a moron, but you are, in fact, one of the morons responsible for giving us the Chimp in the first place?
And you support the Iraq war?
And you think Democrats are more to blame for climate inaction than the GOP?
I’ve been trying very hard to be respectful and considerate of your opinions, but this is a deal-breaker.
Either you’re lying through your teeth and arguing in bad faith, or you can’t tell your ass from a hole in the ground.
In either case, go away and let the grown-ups have an intelligent conversation.
Oh the conversation where partisan Democrats wank each other over Bush single-handedly causing 9/11????
I’m sorry this hive-mind, borg attitude to donkeys vs. elephants is offensive to me. And if you don’t agree youre a Republican and Bush is your President. Fuck that and fuck those that argue like that.
July 8th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
Because I think in nonpartisan terms.
Look, sometimes things happen, and a given ideology and approach–such as Bush’s resentment-driven approach to counterterrorism–contributes to those events. It is really stupid to refuse to assign blame because you want to be “non-partisan”. Grow up.
July 8th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
Oh the conversation where partisan Democrats wank each other over Bush single-handedly causing 9/11????
Can you read? That’s not what we’re saying. You’re either stupid or dishonest.
July 8th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
I’m sorry this hive-mind, borg attitude to donkeys vs. elephants is offensive to me. And if you don’t agree youre a Republican and Bush is your President. Fuck that and fuck those that argue like that.
Wow, stupid. You voted for Nader which helped install Bush as president. You support the Iraq war. Ergo, Bush is your president.
And you find it offensive that everythign isn’t always equal? that we can make distinctions between the parties and support the one that furthers our ideological convictions? You think that everything is always the same and any drawing of distinctions between a party we support and one that assholes support is evidence of a “hive mind”? Wow, that is sad.
July 8th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
“Bush is your President’
No, Bush was OUR President. Part of the stupidity of partisanship is this idea that each side elects a President that is only THEIR President when they get a majority (okay, sort of close to one, for W’s first term); that the other side has no part of when they lose.
That was wrong when Republicans did it to Clinton, it was wrong when Democrats did it to Bush, and it’s wrong when Republicans do it now, to Obama.
It’s arguably the same sort of alienation that led to knuckleheads voting for Nader in 2000, which I cannot find any defense for, certainly not in retrospect. (I cannot even see a contemporaneous argument for a Nader vote in 2000 that isn’t blindly contrarian — and narcissist.)
And it’s important to make a distinction between the absolutely fair, utterly righteous RESPONSIBILITY that hangs on Bush, which he will carry to his grave and beyond, for 9-11 happening on his watch.
The BLAME comes from the simple truth that he had many opportunities to make preventing 9-11 more of a priority — and he repeatedly refused to do it, even treating people who tried to get him to realize what he was looking at with contempt: “there, you’ve covered your ass now”.
Is there something ELSE that properly describes the appropriate reaction to a responsible guy in authority who reacted like that? What do you call it, if not “blame”?
Saying otherwise isn’t contrarian, it’s delusional.
You can’t do the same exercise with Gore, because it will only take you as far as the observation that if he had been President in 2001, and 9-11 had happened on HIS watch, he would have been just as responsible as W — even more so, perhaps, because it would be fair to assign a continuity to policy from Clinton to Bush that is not fair to assign to Bush (or Clinton, retroactively).
But you can’t BLAME Gore for 9-11 happening on his watch, the way it happened on Bush’s, because the facts of the case are that Bush did NOT continue what Clinton had been doing, the priority he had placed on counter-terrorism. If Gore had been President, continued those policies, and the attack had succeeded anyway, arguably he could be blamed for not doing more, or for not doing something different.
But Bush can properly be blamed for failing to meet his responsibilites. Gore can’t. That’s not partisan — that’s candor.
July 8th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
The BLAME comes from the simple truth that he had many opportunities to make preventing 9-11 more of a priority — and he repeatedly refused to do it, even treating people who tried to get him to realize what he was looking at with contempt: “there, you’ve covered your ass now”.
Hindsight over 9-11 is easy. 9-11 was unprecendented. All this is an attempt to blame Bush for political points. And the only people who do it are partsan twerps.
July 8th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
But Bush can properly be blamed for failing to meet his responsibilites. Gore can’t. That’s not partisan — that’s candor.
So Clinton’s to blame for Oklahoma city?
You crybabies whine “protect us protect us”. What do you want, a surveillance state? Because that’s what you’ll get with your careless baseless partisan bitching.
The Republicans will gladly engage in the debate over keeping us safe you dumbfucks.
July 8th, 2009 at 6:03 pm
What do you want, a surveillance state? Because that’s what you’ll get with your careless baseless partisan bitching.
The Republicans will gladly engage in the debate over keeping us safe you dumbfucks.
Lee Siegel, is that you??
July 8th, 2009 at 6:09 pm
MY “People would say that one good thing about George W. Bush was that he was dimwitted, which made him understand leadership.”
Exactly. I remember reading dozens of “mainstream” articles back in ‘01 and ‘02 lauding Bush for making decisions based solely on what his gut was telling him.
Only the man who sees things purely in black and white is a man who can make timely and proper command decisions -that was the general gist.
The American media. Endorsing stupidity as a valuable leadership tool. Pathetic, but understandable.
July 8th, 2009 at 6:12 pm
Immediately after 9/11, it was proper to give Bush the benefit of the doubt that the attack would have happened as well if Gore had been President. But in the hindsight that now includes Katrina and the financial service meltdown–two more instances in which his administration was caught catastrophically unawares–Bush should no longer be accorded that benefit.
July 8th, 2009 at 6:42 pm
None of which answers Gelman’s underlying question: Is there a measurable, verifiable variable for “contrariness”? Anything else, he implies, would be dubious generalizations of the kind offered here (not that I myself have anything against generalization). Gelman is a political scientist with all the disciplinary baggage this entails: a social science measuring its success against physics or biology.
Gelman’s point in worth discussing, not because it invites us to speculate about the evolution of op-ed writing, but because it contains a strong valuation about what kind of knowledge is most relevant in public discourse. In this case, its rigorously empirical. What does that suggest about the myriad of public, political pronouncements that fail to meet Gelmans’ implicit standard?
July 8th, 2009 at 6:51 pm
I’d agree that the corporate media pundits are mindlessly contrarian, if not for the fact that whenever the usual establishmentarian shibboleths are aired — like, balanced budgets are always the highest public good, or America always has the right to meddle in everyone else’s internal political affairs, or the Democrats are dangerously weak on defense — they almost always are in lockstep agreement.
The mindless part is clearly right, but not the contrarian part.
July 8th, 2009 at 7:11 pm
I think 9/11 would not have happened if Gore had been elected, and I point to the thwarted Millennium Bombings as support. Democrats prevent terror attacks on Americans. Republicans use them to forward their policy goals — and ardently wish for more in public interviews.
July 8th, 2009 at 7:12 pm
Since Bush took office in a palace coup, he is perhaps the first President in my lifetime who really was not mine.
July 8th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
I’m guessing all the people that think the political discourse in the 1990s was a lot like the “college debate circuit” have never spent a substantial amount of time being involved with the college debate circuit.
July 8th, 2009 at 7:46 pm
theAmericanist:
You’re right that my analogy wasn’t in any way contrarian; I had been snookered by Poptarts’ ‘I’m a reasonable person’ act and didn’t realize he was just some wingnut so I was trying to explain my feelings on how much actual BLAME to assign to Bush.
The analogy isn’t supposed to stack up in every particular*, it’s just a useful way, IMO, of showing how I can wish that someone better had been at the plate during the leadup to 9/11 without saying “9/11 was Bush’s Fault.
*Although if you know baseball you know that statistically speaking one pro catcher, defensively, is much the same as another, so removing a catcher for a PH is not normally something you decline to do for defensive purposes. At any position, furthermore, you pinch hit when down late without regard to the defensive implications unless you would actually be incapable of fielding a complete team.
July 8th, 2009 at 8:05 pm
I for one find unnecessary exclamation points rather contrarian. Or maybe that makes me one.
July 8th, 2009 at 9:28 pm
Of course, it was just unpreventable to stop four teams of terrorists from hijacking four planes. Why, it happens all the time in U.S. history…
But one thing I think we can say about Gore. Being a dem, he just wouldn’t be tough enough, like Bush, to bring Bin Laden in dead or alive. We needed a president with guts and determination so that there wasn’t some freaking Al Qaeda central for the next president. And eight years and two trillion dollars later, we can really say, uh, that bin Laden musta died by his own self or something.
The GOP talks tough in order to spend money on Raytheon, etc. If they actually had, well, killed bin Laden and not allowed every significant Taliban leader to escape or get airlifted over the Afghan border, how would they have a threat to get re-elected?
July 8th, 2009 at 9:39 pm
I find most people described as contrarians boring, stupid, lazy, or irrelevant. Mostly irrelevant (Michael Kinsley, et al)
July 8th, 2009 at 10:58 pm
It should be said in a non-partisan way that if McCain had won in 2000, the attack on WTC would have been thwarted. Gore, McCain, even Lamar Alexander – any normally competent politico. It took an extraordinarly bad former alcoholic and egomaniac like Bush, with an extraordinarily bad advising team, to contrive the incompetence that left U.S. vulnerabie to an easily preventable attack. If you elect a man prone to panic attacks whose record is of solid organizational failure all the way through, this is what you get.
July 8th, 2009 at 11:35 pm
Poptarts sez yet more stupid stuff:
1) “9-11 was unprecedented..”
Um, no, it wasn’t. In fact, the World Trade Center had ALREADY been attacked, in 1993. It was in all the papers — you didn’t know this?
And suicide bombers in aircraft is SOOO 1945.
2) “So Clinton’s to blame for Oklahoma city?”
More precisely, Clinton was responsible for failing to prevent Oklahoma City — but nobody particularly blames him for it, the way Bush is properly blamed for 9-11.
This isn’t a double standard, because there was a ton of evidence brought to Bush’s attentiion that bin Laden was determined to attack in the US (his August 6 briefing), that hijacking planes to attack buildings was a likely method (the Rudman report), etc. which Bush ignored or dis’d, e..g, “you’ve covered your ass now”. He didn’t maintain the Clinton policies that made countering terrorism a priority, which were largely a RESPONSE to the 1993 bombing. When you change a policy to prevent what people are telling you is likely to happen, because the threat is not a priority for you: then you are not only responsible, you are to blame when the threat turns out to be real — just like you were warned.
There was no such evidence brought to Clinton’s attention that a Timothy McVeigh was likely to blow up the Murrah building, which in turn had never been attacked by anyone like McVeigh before, the way the World Trade Center had already been attacked by Muslim terrorists 8 years before 9-11. So Clinton was responsible — but not to blame.
See how this works, Poptarts?
I agree with Dillinger that apologists for Bush immediately after 9-11 could legitimately try to claim the benefit of the doubt, that Bush was a competent guy who got blind-sided, that — like the Oklahoma City bombing — it could have happened on any President’s watch. The benefit of that doubt covers a lot of the blame that hangs over Bush for failing to respond to the August 6 briefing, etc — in a sense, that’s a contrarian view, cuz it really ought to be conventional wisdom that Bush was a knucklehead who was told we were going to be attacked and did nothing about it. But so long as he could plausibly claim that he was a competent guy who was just WRONG on this one thing, unlike the rest of his Presidency — well.
But when 9-11 was followed by Katrina (what, nobody predicted a hurricane might hit New Orleans? That perhaps the Big Easy would be flooded? That just maybe having somebody at FEMA who knew what he was doing might be a good idea?), and the Iraq War (Bush can’t even remember who decided to disband the Iraqi army, or why?), he doesn’t get the benefit of that doubt anymore.
But I don’t agree with Roger that any competent President would have prevented 9-11.
I don’t think bin Laden’s plan was brilliant. In fact, it SHOULD have been found out — excuse me, flight schools? Guys who wanted to learn how to fly jetliners — but not to land them? I think bin Laden hit a one in a million shot — and in the end, there’s no 100% foolproof way to guard against an enemy getting that lucky.
But that’s WHY you do the contrarian thing, both to anticipate what you might not be prepared for (”Farnsworth, I want you to draw up plans for countering a surprise North Korean invasion of Japan…”), and — deliberately understanding hindsight — for what you knew you didn’t, and probably couldn’t have stopped: to find out HOW you could have realistically done it… if only.
Cuz that’s the kind of thinking you’re gonna need, next time.
July 9th, 2009 at 1:08 am
I’m a college debate coach who just cut this as evidence to be used in a debate as to why policy debate discourse is not good.
I’m not sure if this is what Mr. Yglesias had in mind.
July 9th, 2009 at 4:57 am
[...] are rational, but when you take a closer look, they’re just like right-wing Christians! Matt Yglesias [...]
July 9th, 2009 at 7:08 am
Poptarts, you’re roll in this debate continues to blow my mind. Let’s just take the simple, uncontroversial facts. Bush was warned that terrorism was serious business. He specifically chose not to make it a high level responsibility which systematically limited our ability to prevent terrorist attacks. Do you disagree with any of these claims?
Your next step would be to argue that 9/11 was truly unpreventable. Here, I would recommend doing some research starting with the comission report. There were ample opportunities to prevent 9/11 without any further restrictions on civil liberties as they existed pre-9/11.
So the only remaining argument, is that nothing that Bush did over an 8 month time period actually mattered. But that claim suggests a lack of understanding in how the federal government works. The president can, in fact, influence the priorities of the agencies he directs. He determines where resources are focused and how high threat discussions are elevated. When principal actors at a high level in the government are discussing and communicating about threats and information, you’re less likely to see the communication failures that lead to missed opportunities to prevent 9/11.
Ultimately, it is just impossible to defend the position that Bush did not make it significantly more likely that law enforcement would fail to prevent 9/11. In my mind, that makes him responsible. In your non-partisan mind, apparently we can’t assign blame. If that’s what non-partisan means then non-partisanship is a suicide pact.
July 9th, 2009 at 9:06 am
I’ve lost all respect for anti-war types like you.
Haha!
You’re either stupid or dishonest.
Probably both.
July 9th, 2009 at 9:45 am
Let us not forget about the “dimwittedness” of the American electorate. How do you think George W. got elected in the first place? Best to look at yourselves, Republican party voters, to discover the messes you electorates got us in. a la, via your elected dimwitted national leaders.
July 9th, 2009 at 11:04 am
Poptarts, you’re roll in this debate continues to blow my mind. Let’s just take the simple, uncontroversial facts. Bush was warned that terrorism was serious business. He specifically chose not to make it a high level responsibility which systematically limited our ability to prevent terrorist attacks. Do you disagree with any of these claims?
I do know the counterterrorism forces and the CIA and FBI were all covering their asses and leaking in ways to evade responsibility. But yes I acknowledge Bush didn’t take it as seriously as he should have, which is easier to see in hindsight. I do think there is a lot of bullshit spin, since Bush is presumed guilty.
Your next step would be to argue that 9/11 was truly unpreventable. Here, I would recommend doing some research starting with the comission report. There were ample opportunities to prevent 9/11 without any further restrictions on civil liberties as they existed pre-9/11.
Yes no doubt the FBI and CIA fucked up.
So the only remaining argument, is that nothing that Bush did over an 8 month time period actually mattered. But that claim suggests a lack of understanding in how the federal government works. The president can, in fact, influence the priorities of the agencies he directs. He determines where resources are focused and how high threat discussions are elevated. When principal actors at a high level in the government are discussing and communicating about threats and information, you’re less likely to see the communication failures that lead to missed opportunities to prevent 9/11.
8 months is too little time to change anything. Yes Bush didn’t make it a priority but those agencies tasked with protecting us failed in their jobs. Again it’s easy to see in hindsight.
Ultimately, it is just impossible to defend the position that Bush did not make it significantly more likely that law enforcement would fail to prevent 9/11. In my mind, that makes him responsible. In your non-partisan mind, apparently we can’t assign blame. If that’s what non-partisan means then non-partisanship is a suicide pact.
Significantly? No. I agree Bush was in charge and could have done a better job, facts you can use when arguing with your Dittohead uncle.
But if there is attack while Obama is in office will you blame him? Probably not because you’re partisan. Republicans are always wrong and Democrats always right. Republicans are always to blame, Democrats blameless. It’s politics for morons.
July 9th, 2009 at 11:18 am
“It’s politics for morons.”
Well, you would know.
July 9th, 2009 at 11:29 am
Yeah I’m sure if Al Qaeda had went ahead 9 months before, they wouldn’t have succeeded. Douchebags.
July 9th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
If it turns out that he had received plenty of warnings, as Bush did, and flagrantly ignored them, as Bush did, then yes. Otherwise, no. This is not difficult to understand.
But you won’t understand it, because it’s very important to your ego to pretend that everyone else around you is ‘partisan’ and only you, special chosen golden child that you are, can see through all these partisan facts and partisan logic. Your special NaderVision (TM) goggles (patent pending) let you see that like, both sides are, like, totally the same, man! False equivalences are totally groovy, man.
July 9th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
What Poptarts doesn’t understand, about either the thread or the larger issues surrounding 9-11, or even about being contrary, is what it all is FOR.
Poptarts doesn’t like Clinton, nor Gore, and voted for Nader. Evidently there’s a bit of guilt and transference there, since he/she/it can be blamed for Bush, because Poptarts is responsible for the consequences of the Nader vote in 2000. Obviously Poptarts is a bit haunted by the fact that voting for Nader had consequences.
But the point of the thread is whether public opinion is more contrarian than it used to be. That sorta begs the question what exactly it means to be ‘contrarian’, and if it can be measured or perceived in any way that would make it meaningful to say it is more so now than it used to be.
In that very narrow sense, there’s something worth noting about Poptarts role in the thread: to the extent there is a consensus, challenging it is contrarian. If everybody believes the world is round, it would be contrarian to insist that, in fact, it is flat. That wouldn’t change the fact that the world IS round — but (particularly for somebody who knows that), the contrarian impulse to challenge what ‘everybody knows” isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There are lots of examples of things that “everybody knew” turned out to be wrong, so the impulse to contradict is like anything else, it has to be evaluated on the merits.
But it’s not contrarian to insist that Bush isn’t to blame for 9-11, even if you make the distinction between being responsible (he WAS President, after all) and blame. It’s perverse. It requires ignorance, partisanship, and a kind of delusional approach to reality that is truly a wonder to behold.
Absolving Bush from blame first requires you to insist that none of the things he actually did about terrorism — reversing the priority Clinton gave it , stalling high-level briefings, hiring guys who were against enforcement to run the INS, finally even dissing the guy who briefed him that “bin Laden determined to strike in the US” – had any effect at all.
It’s one thing to make the dubious argument that Bush couldn’t have changed much in 8 months; it’s another to note that he sure as hell TRIED — but failed. And yet what he was trying to do was exactly consistent with the result: stop paying fire insurance and start playing with matches while you tell the grownups who are warning you that’s dangerous, it’s not hard to assign blame when your house burns down. Poptarts is in flat-out denial — as if none of the things Bush DID do really happened.
But of course they did. So that leads to the second interesting thing about Poptarts — the idea that we can know what WOULD have happened, if things had been different, and draw a conclusion from it.
That’s how fools reason — so it’s not how contrarianism oughta work, cuz it’s not necessarily a foolish thing, to contradict what “everybody knows”, while it is very foolish to figure you know for a fact that bin Laden wouldn’t have been so lucky with some other President.
That’s what I disagreed with the guy who said that “any competent” President would have prevented 9-11. It wasn’t a brilliant plot, so it could have been stopped in a thousand ways — Bush might have hired somebody at the INS who was NOT the lead opponent of enforcing the law on student visas, for example, and that other guy just might have started looking for Mohammad Atta in March, f’r instance (instead of giving him his green card a few months not only despite being dead AND a terrorist, but also the most famous dead terrorist in the world). Or as I described above, a different President might have ordered somebody to figure out how the bad guys were going to get us, instead of waiting to hear about it.
But in the end, bid Laden succeeded cuz he was lucky. And you can’t ever be 100% successful against a lucky enemy.
So what Poptarts is doing isn’t contrarian — it’s ignorant, perverse and a kind of guilt-ridden compensation for having been so spectacularly wrong in his/her/it’s vote in 2000.
Useful contrarianism doesn’t just say “whatever most people think is wrong”. Useful contrarianism figures out a smarter and more effective way to look at whatever it is that most people think is true. F’r instance, GK Chesterton wrote a great essay pointing out that travel makes people more narrowminded, that many people think blissfully well of the world until they make the mistake of actually experiencing it — THAT’s contrarianism as it ought to be.
My own argument is that, rather than hallucinate that Gore or McCain WOULD have prevented 9-11, we oughta use ACTUAL hindsight to figure out realistically how it could have been stopped: no fair saying, well, gee, what if bin Laden had written out his plans, wrapped ‘em around a couple of cigars, and left ‘em on the White House lawn?
I’ve cited two ways, both directly opposite to decisions Bush DID make — hiring somebody more competent to run the INS, and assigning somebody to plan how to attack the US in the way that the CIA was reporting bin Laden intended to do it. I think we COULD have stopped those bastards — and I’ve given a couple ways how.
Effective contrarianism.
July 9th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
[...] where are we at in the world of political contrarianism? Poster AW explains it well. As the only way most print journalists can make a good living is by becoming cable news talking [...]
July 9th, 2009 at 1:43 pm
AND:
A million dead Iraqis
A million dead Iraqis
A million dead Iraqis
A million dead Iraqis
A million dead Iraqis
A million dead Iraqis
A million dead Iraqis
A million dead Iraqis
A million dead Iraqis
A million dead Iraqis
A million dead Iraqis
A million dead Iraqis…
Matthew somehow always conveniently forgets to add the million dead Iraqis into his cost-benefit analysis. For some reason those lives are not notable bad consequences of the policy, for Matthew. Perhaps because Matthew has his own share of their blood on his hands as well.
A million dead Iraqis
A million dead Iraqis
A million dead Iraqis
A million dead Iraqis
July 9th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
Stopping terrorists, like science, involves chance and a prepared mind. Look at the Ressam plot. It was stopped by an alert customs agent at our ferry terminal. Intelligence warns us and lets us prepare our minds. We knew that using aircraft as a weapon was likely since the French had recently foiled a plot involving hijackers asking for a full load of fuel and clearance to fly to Paris. If we had been doing the obvious follow up, the 9/11 plot might have been foiled.
Another Oklahoma City bomb is less likely these days because large purchase of certain materials by unfamiliar parties is much more likely to lead to queries and action. Unfortunately, there are a lot of politicians who protect our domestic terrorists, since many of them are affiliated with the Republican party and its agenda. Look at the recent squawk about that right wing terrorism report. Is anyone cracking down on churches teaching jihad against abortionists? If they are, they are doing it quietly.
It takes real police work to fight terrorism, and real police work is amazingly boring. Why do you think cops need all that coffee and those donuts? The typical coup is stopping someone like Ressam with a foot chase through downtown Port Angeles. That alert customs officer parlayed that capture into a County Commissionership, originally as a Republican, but now as an Independent. He didn’t get to stand on the deck of an aircraft carrier with a “Mission Accomplished” banner.
July 9th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
Jeff, why are you pointing to the WSJ? It’s infamous for lying continuously (see FAIR, Columbia Journalism School, etc. exposes), so why would you expect any sane person to even follow the link?
Oh, wait. You’re not talking to sane people — you’re trying to reinforce the prejudices of those who still believe in the WSJ.
July 13th, 2009 at 11:11 am
Just catching up, but I don’t really understand this POV.
I find the main point is quite a stretch – that being contrary climaxed as an attitude in the 90s. Last time I checked, we still had a FOX news channel and a very partisan set of votes in the Congress.
it would be a little more accurate to me to say the current stream of contrariness started in the 90s.
But it’s a gross lie to say this contrariness caused 9.11. That took years of policy and ignorance from both Dems and Republicans going back to at least the first oil crisis in the 70s. Even then you still needed a systemic failure on the part of the agencies created to help protect us (FBI, CIA).
And I don’t recall the press saying Bush was dimwitted and thus had a better understanding of leadership. I remember a press (prior to Bush election) in love with his slip-ups and spontaneous attitude which they considered signs of warmth and humanity compared to Gore’s technocratic persona.