Category Intellectual Dishonesty

USA 234, HIPRB! 1

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

Happy 4th of July, all you American patriots…the rest of ya, too.  I’ve got a gift for you, even though you’re not the one turning 234 years old: I invite you to remove your shoes and stroll barefoot among the new tabs at the top of the page, up there under the site title (I gotta get a better title).

For almost a year I’ve been using this page to show off my ideas, but mostly to practice putting one word in front of the other on a regular basis again.  When I discovered that there can be more than one page here, I knew how I wanted to use them.

For years I’ve been saving quotations that appealed to me.  Some I saved just because they were so well written but most of them are ideas I agree with, expressed more ably and eloquently than I am capable (of).  (See.)

Choose from ideas about American law and government and politics, thoughts about my first post-college profession, a section of funnies, and a collection of philosophical takes on life.  I hope you enjoy them, and offer your comments pro and con.  I’ll be adding to the sections as new material is discovered.

So, what did you get me?

The Constitution for grown-ups

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As we prepare to pay scant attention to another confirmation hearing for a nominee to the Supreme Court of the United States, consider:

When David Souter was nominated to the court by President Bush (the first one…the good one) in 1990 he was little known in political circles outside of New Hampshire, but he had been a judge in trial and appellate courts in that state.  His nomination was opposed by NOW, the NAACP, and senators Ted Kennedy and John Kerry (among others) because they feared he was a right-wing ideologue.  By the time he retired in 2009—actually, long before that—conservatives blasted him for being a liberal, which many conservatives define as “one who does not believe as I do.”

David Souter’s judicial philosophy didn’t change in those years but the way we look at politics did; he left the court the same principled, thoughtful man who joined it a generation before.  So it’s worth considering what he had to say to Harvard graduates last month about the law and the role of judges in the American legal system.

The Constitution has a good share of deliberately open-ended guarantees, like rights to due process of law, equal protection of the law, and freedom from unreasonable searches.  These provisions cannot be applied like the requirement for 30-year-old senators; they call for more elaborate reasoning to show why very general language applies in some specific cases but not in others, and over time the various examples turn into rules that the Constitution does not mention.

Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick notes that some cheered what they saw as Souter’s disagreement with the judicial theories of some of his former court colleagues, but she finds what I think is a more valuable avenue to explore:

He wasn’t just using the opportunity to debunk what he called the "fair-reading model" of constitutional interpretation (which is quite different, although related, to the originalist approach).  And he wasn’t just using the speech to argue for evolving moral standards in judging, although he did that, too.  It seems to me that Souter’s decision to avoid all the hot-button words signals a much bigger project: He wants Americans to consider—in advance of yet another tedious confirmation hearing—the possibility that judging is really, really hard and only special people should get to do it.

Souter makes the point that the Constitution’s words are not always plain and clear, and are not without internal contradiction, and so the requirements for being a judge (particularly an appellate judge, a Supreme Court justice) go beyond high scores in reading comprehension.  He’s telling us, as Lithwick puts it, that we must recognize “ in Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ formulation, that ‘certainty generally is illusion and repose is not our destiny.’  He is telling us to stop dreaming of oracular judges with perfect answers to simple constitutional questions. He is telling us, in other words, to grow up.”

We shall see what Elena Kagan chooses to share about her philosophy of judging and the law.  Doug Kendall and Jim Ryan (no relation) hope that Kagan treats us as grown ups, and

…would be doing the entire nation as well as the Constitution itself a service if she would use the confirmation process to express and explain her commitment to follow the Constitution—all of it.  If Kagan does talk about the text and history of the Constitution, as well as the role of the court, it could go a long way toward recalibrating the current national debate on the judiciary and the Constitution.

They make a point on this issue that many overlook: it’s not just the original Constitution that justices must consider:

The amendments passed since the founding era have been glossed over a lot lately, at the Tea Parties, in the states, and even at the Supreme Court, where the conservative "originalists" seem to view what was originally drafted by the framing generation as better, and more legitimate law, than the changes made since.  This view is absurd…

Recognizing that both sides have been creative in their interpretation of the Constitution over the years, Kendall and Ryan urge Kagan (and everyone left of the political right) not to forego a fight with the right over fear of being branded hypocritical, but to defend the Constitution:

To be sure, the Constitution, properly interpreted, will not provide support for all liberal causes and nothing but liberal causes.  But it doesn’t provide support solely for right-wing fantasies, either, and Obama’s nominees to the court should make that clear.  The peddling of a selectively edited Constitution as patriotic and principled should be shown for what it is: a disgrace to our real Constitution.

Dear Michael Berry…

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

Really?  Really?

I confess I don’t listen to your radio show, but if Houston’s Leading Information Source is to be believed you said on the air Wednesday that you thought it’d be a good thing that any mosque built near the site of the September 11 attacks in New York City be bombed:

“I’ll tell you this — if you do build a mosque, I hope somebody blows it up.” Berry added: “I hope the mosque isn’t built, and if it is, I hope it’s blown up, and I mean that.”

Really?

I see that you posted a message online the next day insisting

“I did NOT advocate bombing any mosque.”

and provided the audio there so people can listen for themselves.  Good.  But the words say what the words say: “I hope it’s blown up, and I mean that” do not convey the same message as “I hope the mosque isn’t built.”  And

“I hope the mosque isn’t built, and if it is, I hope it’s blown up, and I mean that.”

teeters right on the edge of encouragement.  I expect better from someone serious about the responsibility attendant to using the public airwaves.  (Yes, I know there are plenty of others who aren’t…but if Johnny jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge…)

I respect your apology for the poor word choice, but what’s really beneath you is playing the victim: accusing the Council on American-Islamic Relations of trying to intimidate you?  Telling your audience, “If that means I have to go off the air because I have an opinion that offends them, then that’s what that means.”?

(Does that kind of thing really sell on the air these days?  Really?)

The “no information” interview

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sham (sham) n. [prob. < a N.Eng. dial. var. of shame] 1. formerly, a trick or fraud  2. a) an imitation that is meant to deceive; counterfeit  b) a hypocritical action, deceptive appearance, etc. (The Tiger Woods interviews on ESPN and Golf Channel were a sham)

It only took seeing the first few seconds of The Golf Channel’s interview to realize something was screwy:

You don’t do a serious interview standing up, in front of what looks like a projected woodlands background, wearing a golf cap; the interviewer raced through questions without seeming to hear the answers; when you’re asked to explain what happened, you can’t just refer the world to the police report!

First of all, in this case, it’s not all in the police report.

Second, even if it were, it’s completely legitimate to want to see and hear him tell the story.  But I didn’t know at the time that The World’s Greatest Golfer Ever had limited the interview to only five minutes.  Kelly Tilghman didn’t have time to follow up: if she asked again—and he stalled again—she doesn’t get to ask any other questions…plus, she doesn’t want to challenge the famously testy TWGGE for fear of losing access later.

Eric Deggans saw what I was seeing: Woods wasn’t doing an interview, he was making something that looked like an interview, and would afford him the option to say “Hey, I already talked about this” and refuse to answer later when a real reporter asked the questions he still hasn’t answered.  (That’s a BS answer anyway, but the sports media lets athletes get away with it all the time.)

I worked in radio (back in the last century) and I understand the professional and promotional value of having the story first.  But the emphasis on “breaking news” comes at the expense of understanding the story: too many media companies use it as an excuse for why they don’t find out what’s really going on in Story A—they’re too busy doing live shots on Stories J and R.

And if they don’t understand that, how do you even discuss the issue of sending out an interviewer who has a private business relationship with the interviewee!

Tiger Woods is no idiot, and smart newsmakers do well to exploit the news media’s self-imposed soft spot to get their story out first—they know that it’s harder to change an impression than to make one.

Sgt. Schultz would have been proud

Pat Ryan 1 Comment

It was Daniel Patrick Moynihan who said (that I first heard) that while a person is entitled to their own opinion, they are not entitled to their own facts.  The annoying trait among so many people lately–to accept as fact only that information which supports their beliefs, and to reflexively deny the…the factualness of what does not–is nicely addressed in today’s piece by Leonard Pitts, Jr.

[I] can remember a time when facts settled arguments. This is back before everything became a partisan shouting match, back before it was permissible to ignore or deride as “biased” anything that didn’t support your worldview.

If you and I had an argument and I produced facts from an authoritative source to back me up, you couldn’t just blow that off. You might try to undermine my facts, might counter with facts of your own, but you couldn’t just pretend my facts had no weight or meaning.

But that’s the intellectual state of the union these days, as evidenced by all the people who still don’t believe the president was born in Hawaii or that the planet is warming.

(snip)

To listen to talk radio, to watch TV pundits, to read a newspaper’s online message board, is to realize that increasingly, we are a people estranged from critical thinking, divorced from logic, alienated from even objective truth. We admit no ideas that do not confirm us, hear no voices that do not echo us, sift out all information that does not validate what we wish to believe.

I submit that any people thus handicapped sow the seeds of their own decline; they respond to the world as they wish it were rather [than] to the world as it is.

Do you know what you call a person who does see the world as it is, and doesn’t like what he or she sees, and despite having the responsibility and the power to do something about it, doesn’t?  Yep: a member of the United States Congress.   Paul Krugman accuses Republicans, but they’re not alone on this.

At this point, then, Republicans insist that the deficit must be eliminated, but they’re not willing either to raise taxes or to support cuts in any major government programs. And they’re not willing to participate in serious bipartisan discussions, either, because that might force them to explain their plan — and there isn’t any plan, except to regain power.

Know-nothings, and do-nothings.  What worries me the most is the growing number of people in this country who have one foot in each camp.