Things People Say

In a book review in Sunday's NYT, noted Conservative political scientist Harvey Mansfield was doing a fine job of proving that if you want to think about the US's Constitution Madison is a better guide than noted Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt. He than argued that

[w]ith regard to welfare, Democrats are for it, Republicans against it; with regard to national security, the situation is reversed.

He cannot possible think that that sentence has any resemblance to reality. If he does, he needs to be kept away from sharp objects. Maybe he's trying to be funny, I don't see it. I stopped reading here because he's using a shop-worn trope so lazily that it undermines his attempt to engage in a serious intellectual endeavor.

The other day Jack Cassidy wrote about bike lanes in New York City, it set off a bunch of other folks who treated Cassidy as if he was interested in a debate. He isn't. In his first paragraph he writes that

[a]t the risk of incurring the wrath of the bicycle lobby, a constituency that pursues its agenda with about as much modesty and humor as the Jacobins pursued theirs[.]

 This isn't an attempt to engage with the other side of the discussion; it's an attempt to be an obnoxious fool. Think about all the folks who have been called humorless and dictatorial: feminists, ecological activists, lesbians, gay rights activists, Liberals, egg heads, suffragettes, civil rights activists, anti-war activists, Wobblies, etc, etc.  It's a trope rolled out by folks who realize that they are wrong but find the truth inconvenient or, in this case, causing them inconvenience so Cassidy, in this case, engages in an ad hominem
that frees everyone from listening to what he has to say and all the responses should have been: this kind of lazy nonsense isn't worth taking seriously.

In other discursive fields, the usual suspects made clear that they aren't actually interested in what what they say means.

On Friday, David Brooks wrote an op ed bit about how folks are overly confident and how bad that this. This is a man who makes his living talking about things he knows very little about and writing books that are equally filled with nonsense and gobbledygook. He ought to become the change he wants to see and resign to live a life of quiet contemplation in Tibet.

Last week, Michele Bachmann mangled American history and, when called on it, accused everyone in Massachusetts of hating freedom and blamed Obama's teleprompter for her ignorance. She ought to go with Brooks.

Finally,  according to yesterday's Wisconsin State Journal, Sarah Palin, who left her job after a half-term because she worried about lawsuits, said of the Wisconsin senators who skedaddled, that

[i]f your cause is worthy and just, and if it's -- it's worthwhile then should have  the ability to defend it. You shouldn't just retreat and duck and cover[.]

She has now made clear that she will not run for President and that she too is off to Tibet.

The think that ties all this together is that nearly none of the people involved particularly cares that they incoherent or implicated themselves as hopeless unreflective ninnies, it's that their unreflective ninnihood is what earns them a check or a place in the political firmament.