The failure of conservative humor

As if more evidence was needed?

I don't actually read that many books of hard-core conservative persuasion. It's kind of amusing, since many of my personal principles and philosophies do seem conservative on their face, but today's so-called conservatives lie too much. Today's uninteresting example is Don't Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards by P.J. O'Rourke. He's supposed to be a humorist of sorts, though a more apt description is "libertarian propagandist of little skill".

I've actually read 6 of his earlier books, so I have to count this book as being fooled for the 6th time and shame on me, but I keep hoping to learn something worth the time. After all, the whole point of REAL humor is to learn (in accord with my General Theory of Relatively Funny Stuff), but O'Rourke never fails to disappoint. There are some traces of interesting ideas buried in his stuff, but mostly he's just wasting my time with cheap sophistry. Almost done with this book and so far only detected one interesting thought: The distinction between negative and positive rights. The rest of it was fluff and piffle.

What finally provoked me enough to write this quasi-review was Chapter 8 in Part II. Just too perfect as an example of the intellectual dishonesty of the Libertarians. The premise is supposed to be that Part II is about solutions on an issue-by-issue basis. The ostensible issue of Chapter 8 is gun safety, but O'Rourke actually changes the subject to attack voting rights. It's supposed to be a parody, but it comes off as too sincere, almost a harbinger of the Bolshevik Republican policies of voter disenfranchisement. Actually I'm pretty sure those policies had started before the publication of this book, but either O'Rourke hadn't noticed or it's another example of his highly selective focus. Also a vicious focus in his unfunny personal attacks.

I'll go ahead and run through my earlier tags, though I was planning to discard the book without memory. On a page-based basis:

On page 11 (which is early in Chapter 2, dismissing Chapter 1 as an intro), I was struck by several items, such as the delusional attack against Richard Dawkins that only showed (1) O'Rourke hates Dawkins, and (2) O'Rourke hasn't read the book he's attacking. This page had a number of poorly written, false, and dumb things, but I keep reminding myself that O'Rourke will claim the "It's only a joke" defense, and only more so for his worst writing.

On page 13 I was offended by his joke about the Japanese word "jiyu" for one of the senses of freedom. The only things it showed are (1) racist viciousness, (2) ignorance of the Japanese language and indifference to the truth, and (3) ignorance of what "freedom" actually means--but that's only typical of Libertarian "thinking". The reality is that the Japanese word is about the sense of freedom where the cause of your actions is yourself. Also, I strongly suspect it's a word coined in China, not Japan.

Page 15 had some strikingly offensive personal attacks on the Clintons, but "It's just a joke" of some twisted flavor. A more substantive annoyance was the discussion of "intolerance" without any apparent knowledge of the Paradox of Tolerance. Add Popper's philosophy to the LONG list of important topics O'Rourke is ignorant of or chooses to ignore.

At this point I was already getting fed up and wanted to stop paying such close attention, but... On pages 42 and 43 he dragged Donald Trump into the picture. Really laughable dismissal considering how things have panned out. Most amusing quote must be "Every property he touches seems to go to hell" as he dismisses Trump's self-claimed wealth as a trick of "former Enron accountants". Words worth eating, if not well worth anything, eh?

On page 49 he brings the birthers into the discussion, though Trump doesn't get an explicit mention. The offensive aspect here is the link between birtherism and O'Rourke's own frequent and vicious and unjustified attacks on Barack Obama. Maybe there's some racism there, too, since on the next page (50) he also takes a cheap shot of some sort at Tiger Woods. At least I think it was supposed to be "Just a joke" of some sort. Maybe it was just broken by time? The joke seems to be implying that Woods could not keep a secret, so I'm guessing it had to do with his exposure as a philanderer and subsequent career collapse? Perhaps these things just seem less funny post-Trump-as-politician?

Speaking of narcissistic personality disorder, he actually cites the diagnostic criteria on page 70, but without reference to Trump. If he had mentioned Trump, then it would have looked as wise and prophetic as Harlan Ellison's prediction of the Reagan presidency in The Glass Teat.

Page 95 is the apex of his attacks on science. The only thing O'Rourke actually proves is that he has no idea of what science is about. Even less idea of how it works.

If there's any thoughtful or educational stuff in this book, then it's been shredded far above my poor power to unshred. Sometimes "It's just a joke" is no excuse.

New Pearl Harbor

Version 0.5

Politically Correct Zen Repudiation of The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 by David Ray Griffin

Funny story about contagion and guilt by association here. The only logical result of assuming that the NSA knows that I've 'touched' this book is to publicly repudiate it in the most forceful terms. Easy enough, but is that even adequate? America has fallen down such an insane rabbit's hole that not only are books like this one being published, but a lot of people are buying into them and we're even electing patently insane reality-challenged politicians like Ted Cruz in Texas. You know what they say: Everything's bigger and more crazy in Texas!

So now the question facing me is how to most clearly demonstrate that I am not an insane conspiracy theorist, if I can. After all, I think that I have been contaminated to some degree. While I can dismiss all of the ideas in this particular book, the problem is that I still believe in some conspiracies. Actually, this book uses the most obvious and relevant example: Everyone believes that there was a secret conspiracy to attack the WTC, but the devil is in the details of who was involved and how they pulled it off. A more troublesome example involves the murder of Michael Hastings. Can you believe that his brand of insanity was so dangerous that it could only be 'cured' by hacking his car to kill him? Having considered the problem, I think the best way to repudiate this book is to approach from two angles: (1) a specific destruction of a major point of the book and (2) an alternative and Occamic explanation. However, to make the repudiation stronger, I'm going to apply these perspectives twice, once at a low level and again at the highest level.

There are so many crazy points in the book that it is impossible to pick the best one for detailed refutation. For example, the lack of interception is mostly predicated on not knowing how planes actually fly and maneuver or how humans make decisions under pressure. However, I've decided to focus on the collapse of three buildings in the WTC complex. This author is arguing for the use of explosives, while simultaneously managing to refute himself. The most obvious refutation was his note that explosive-sniffing dogs were in the twin towers up to 5 days before 9/11. That only leaves two lines of analysis: (1) Large quantities of explosives were already in place and trained experts completely failed to detect them, or (2) Large quantities of explosives were were rapidly brought into the towers without anyone detecting the operation. The conspiracy extremists can try to cover those paths with bribery, but... It's hard to reliably bribe dogs and the it's fundamentally impossible to hush up a large number number of people. Even if none of them knew they were handling explosives at the time, many of them would have figured it out afterwards and some of them would have started talking. However, the main reason I reject this idea is that there would have been extremely large quantities of debris contaminated with explosives residue, and that physical evidence could not be completely eliminated no matter how quickly they cleared it away. You have to add a completely new level of insanity to believe that the Chinese would actually destroy all of the evidence once it was in their possession. I certainly think you can rest assured that the Chinese version of the CIA took plenty of samples hoping for something to use for blackmail against America's politicians.

Time for Occam's razor to cut this idea to size. What the book doesn't talk much about is the computer analyses of the structural failures. Once you know that a thing is possible, it's relatively easy to show how it happened. Before these collapses, the computer models seemed to show they were not possible, but afterwards, we sadly know much better. The author actually touches just barely on how the initially local failures unzipped the links between one floor and the vertical framework in each of the buildings that collapsed. Once the failures spread enough for that floor to settle downward, nothing was going to stop the force of gravity from finishing the job, and how. As soon as the failures were adequately modeled, there was little reason to delay the cleanup. The only physical evidence you could hope for would be recognizable traces of some of the original joints around the points of the initial local failures, or some of the neighboring joints that failed in the second stage of spreading, and the odds of finding those few joints in a recognizable state would be pretty microscopic given the vast amount of rubble. Virtually all of the joints were simply sheared to small bits as gravity did its work.

Now let's go to the highest level of the grand conspiracy. In this form, we wind up with an army of accomplices. Even if they didn't know what they were doing at the time, as in the previously mentioned idea of a large crew of people moving explosives without knowing what they were moving, they have had many years to figure it out. Even if they didn't want to talk at the time, they have had many years to change their minds, or even to die of natural causes and leave the evidence behind them if they didn't want to face retaliation. There are too many old sayings and even jokes about how to keep secrets, but the point is always the need for as few conspirators as possible, and all of the grand conspiracy theories totally fail on this point. It's possible to conceive how one or a few people could have killed Michael Hastings, but orchestrating a vast conspiracy with vast guilt trips for all of the conspirators? No, that is beyond my conception, and I even insist that my imagination is far wilder than average.

So what is Occam's answer? It really is hard to explain the low quality of the investigations of the 9/11 attacks. In addition, any explanation has to hold up on the long term. Therefore, I conclude that there were massive failures and plenty of blame, but the failures were obvious and bipartisan. Not sure if this is the truth, or if the truth even matters, and you also have to make allowances that I am currently under the influence of this crazy book, too, but... My theory today is that certain people within the ISI were intimately involved in the planning for the 9/11 attacks, mostly because they hoped to move America to support Pakistan more closely in an alliance against 'non-state' terrorists. It is even possible that members of the CIA or NSA were aware of this conspiracy but regarded it as fundamentally too crazy to succeed and too flawed to cause significant damage even if it partly happened. The actual amount of damage was much worse than anyone imagined, apparently even including Osama Bin Ladin himself. However, I believe that there were internal and secret investigations that quickly determined these problematic facts. These facts were even more extremely problematic because they also showed the intimate relationship between the ISI and the CIA, and they were bipartisan problems since they started with that good-intentioned Democrat Jimmy Carter, continued through the presidencies of Reagan and Poppy Bush and Clinton, and were still there under Dubya's watch. Maybe there was even an element of truth to the New American Century angle, but in the relatively passive sense that the big dick Cheney downgraded the priority of anti-terrorism efforts. I've often felt that some of his extreme reactions as described in The One Percent Doctrine smack of an extremely guilty conscience... No one can be sure about Cheney, however, since he's always been such a cocksure extremist.

So to summarize it to Occam's satisfaction, from their perspective, there was no reason for a public investigation, since they knew almost exactly what had happened and how, and it was extremely embarrassing to EVERYONE involved, no matter what their political persuasions. The bipartisan mess must have been big enough to persuade even President Obama to let it lie. This is kind of like the gerrymandering thing. Both parties are quite willing to work together against the public's interests to protect their own behinds, but just about the one thing all of the professional politicians can agree on is that they should be allowed to stay in office. As this theory applies to 9/11, it's still a bit surprising that none of the people in the know has clearly revealed the truth, but the total number of people carefully watching each other is within the bounds of reason, or at least my reason.

Now it's time for the zen trick, eh? The real significance of this kind of book is what it reveals about the mental instability of America. Our reality makes so little sense that many people are able to look at the wildest conspiracies and take them seriously. I think the one that is bothering me the most these days actually involves the chronic problems with my Android devices. I don't think it is simply the google's growing EVIL as typified by "All of your attention is belongs to the google" leading to large-scale incompetence. I've reached the point of believing the flakiness is linked to snooping software being deployed on a wholesale level. It might be criminals, except that I think they could be and would already have been nailed by following the money trails. Therefore at this point it seems most plausible, even to such a rational and level-headed individual as yours truly, that the real cause is government-driven snooping. We're back to the old joke about the lost quarter:

"Let me help you for your lost quarter. Exactly where were you standing when you noticed it was missing?"

"I was in Afghanistan."

"But Afghanistan is thousands of kilometers from here. Why are you looking here?"

"The light's much better here."

In other words, I'm not a terrorist and I don't even know any terrorists, no matter how much I stretch my rubbery imagination. However, mostly because of my Android devices, I am standing where the light is good. It's convenient for the NSA to harvest my personal information, and so they do, but with a certain amount of bugginess that shows. Since it's Android and since the google has gone all evil on us, it seems most likely that it's driven from America, but we could speculate about the Chinese intelligence agencies, too. Not really anything personal about me (though the game of six degrees of Keven Bacon might argue otherwise), but just cheap data. If you actually are a person of interest and they want to put some actual resources into investigating what you're up to, you might as well surrender now, Dorothy.

Have a lovely non-paranoid day.

P.S. Let me add a special encouragement to your replies and again clarify why I moderate the comments. I'm really interested in your points of disagreement, even if you are a sincere conspiracy theorist, but I'm absolutely opposed to spammers and I will not support them, even for the period until I can nuke their scammy ads. Once again we return to the deep EVIL of the google?

Coming War with Japan

Version 0.3

Can an Non-credible Book like The Coming War with Japan by George Friedman and Meredith LeBard Stimulate Ideas about Credible Threats?

Really, that's about the best I can do to justify reading this book. It's a crazy book, but that also makes it thought-provoking. The threat it proposes and the analysis is ridiculous, but I was able to devise a possible real threat chain--but not involving Japan. I actually conceived of that threat just as I started reading the book, but these authors aren't going anywhere near it. However, the book mainly fails because it makes lots of predictions that have already been invalidated by boring old reality.

The attraction to the book was obviously the title, but as soon as I read that George Friedman was associated with the ultraconservative Heritage Foundation, I knew where it had gone wrong. In brief, this book is just crazy money talking. I started by believing that I understood the Japanese pretty well after living in Japan for more than 20 years, but as a scientific sort of person, I was still willing to look at their evidence. Maybe he really meant an economic war or something plausible? No, they are arguing for military war. Maybe they have some compelling new evidence? No, not only are they using old and well known evidence, but they are using it in ways that are highly selective and even contradictory. (However, perhaps real scientists should be tested by how willing they are to believe things they don't like? In contrast, posers like these authors have already decided what they want to believe, and the key tactic is rejecting all of the problematic facts.)

It seems easiest to dismiss their military threat claim by pointing at their own evidence. The book spends a lot of pages explaining why America fundamentally can't afford to fight ground wars in Asia--but it works the same in reverse and is even less plausible for Japan, which has a much smaller pool of possible soldiers and almost no physical resources compared to America. (Too bad Dubya hadn't read the book before starting the war in Iraq, and perhaps Obama should have read it before ramping things up in Afghanistan...)

This fundamental problem of manpower and resources actually links to my idea for a plausible threat even though I was inclined to dismiss their thesis as soon as I knew they really did mean war in the military sense. This is actually an idea and analysis that came to me almost as soon as I opened the book and before I had read very far at all. It was obvious to me that Japan cannot and will not field a large number of troops, but is there some way they could plausibly fight a war anyway? My thought was that it could be conceivable with robots. The book was written long before that was plausible, but the science fiction authors have been there long ago. What I realized was that it might be conceivable for Japan to make a fleet of drones. Actually this is related to Rumsfeld's mumbling about asymmetric warfare. The cost of destroying an aircraft carrier with a swarm of drones would be extremely low compared to the cost of building the carrier. However, if Japan has the technology, the resources would still be a strain, but... What about the Chinese or the Russians or even the Iranians? Certainly the Chinese could do it using the students who earned masters and PhD degrees in America before they were kicked out of the country. Anyway, it's so obvious that nothing more needs to be said on that topic.

Therefore I'll loop back and point at a few of the glaring flaws in the book, just focusing on a few of the largest ones that caught my eye in the first 50 pages. On page 9 I noticed a citation of Yuddan, which was described as a Japanese bestseller that supports their position. They didn't provide an author, but if it's a bestseller then it should be easy to find, right? Maybe it's even been translated? No, they must have meant a book called 油断 (Yudan) from around 1975 by 堺屋 太一, but I'm pretty certain there was no bestseller called Yuddan, no matter how you spell it in Japanese. At that point I was expecting sloppy research, but they could have waited a bit longer, eh?

On page 29 they seemed to think the the Tokugawa Shogunate was a weak and divided government, which is basically ridiculous. Even the transition to the Meiji Restoration was relatively smooth and efficient, and the country never became fractured or seriously disrupted. Again, a book about Japan should start with a realistic understanding of Japan's history, eh?

On page 50 I saw an especially glaring example of the bias with the statement "The U.S., torn by internal dissension and bureaucratic infighting, ..." The thing that annoys me about this kind of thing is the projective aspects of it. THEY are the ones that are the masters of crippling the government based on the ideological perspective of destroying most of the functions of the government.

Getting out of the first 50 pages, but on page 198 they were arguing that America wasn't involved for the money with this gem, "...economic considerations playing an insignificant role." Again on page 200, with "... devoid of economic interests" just before twisting out "In any event, the reemergence of imperialism is intellectually challenging to a world that is essentially liberal democratic." However on the next page was the what struck me as the most plausible idea in the entire book: "Economics speaks to human greed, while politics speaks to fear." An example of a good idea from a bad source? Or more likely they borrowed it from somewhere and just forgot to mention the source?

Anyway, I mostly feel like I've written more than the book deserved. Lots of other flaws there. I forgot to say China got short shrift... Enough. Suffice it to say you should have a lot of leisure time before spend some of it with this book.

Even worse, I now confess that I wrote that much before finishing the book, and now that I've finished it, I feel I have to say more, even though I even more strongly feel the book was silly and not worth as much of a reaction as I've already written... Onward through the fog:

Some eye-catching, projective, self-contradictory, ridiculous, preposterous, other negative adjectives, or worse (including multiple adjective lists, of course) examples of rightwing bias and slant:

Page 256: "The power is there, but the thought of using it is quite alien to the American mind. Brute interference in free trade is anathema to American moral principles and the American psyche itself. But ideologies change, ...." In other words, American are deeply crazy, but we might change our minds, and history doesn't count, either.

Page 304 favorably cites Paul Wolfowitz, who writes books on crazy for a living.

Page 309 says "This [joint imperialism with the Koreans] would, of course, be a tremendous test of Japanese racism, for Japanese contempt for Korea runs as deep today as it ever did." This caught my eye mostly as a predictive statement that has been completely invalidated by current pro-Korean trends in Japan. It is possible that it was valid when they wrote it--but I did NOT see the evidence and I was living in Japan during the "today" of this book. In some ways I agree with the racism accusation, but "contempt" seems extreme unlikely and implausible as the substantive summary of the complex Japanese feelings towards Korea. I'm trying to make allowances for my having recently arrived in Japan at that time, but I can't buy it.

On page 310, "There is nothing more to conserve" with regards to energy. Absurd and extremely rightwing.

Pages 318-9 has a map predicting the state of the Pacific Ocean in 2000, and in comparison to reality it's completely incorrect, to put it politely. The funniest detail is probably the idea of North Korea being aligned with Japan.

On page 329 they say "How the [Japanese supreme] court could rule that Article 9 permits self-defense when it specifically bans the creation of an armed force is a matter best left to lawyers and theologians." Okay, so you could dismiss it as silly hyperbolic statement, except that it's part of a long section that is attempting to dismiss Japanese pacifism AND on page 328 their attempt to quote Article 9 is mangled. Poor editing is no excuse, eh?

On page 332 they argue that hundreds of bombers are cheaper than individual nuclear bombs. It would actually be possible to make the argument if they had gone into analysis of research funding, but they didn't bother.

In the next section there was a long and confusing passage where they first seemed to be arguing in favor of strategic bombing, though it eventually becomes clear that they are actually arguing against it. Or maybe the authors are on different sides of this topic and just got confused during the editing process?

Eventually that led to the hilariously naive comment on page 338 that "... Shinto Buddhism contains pacifist tendencies is beyond the scope of our discussion." Duh. They are separate religions. Is basic understanding of such fundamental knowledge supposed to be within the scope of authors claiming to write authoritatively about Japan? (No the book never mentioned the actual State Shinto and religious veneration of the emperor that was incorporated into the war effort.)

From page 390 there is a section of predictions, many of which are highly specific or even dated and therefore absolutely refuted, but all of which are completely ridiculous. My guess is that the draft of this section was the first thing the authors wrote, and then the rest of the book was an attempt to justify what they'd already decided they believed. There is a paragraph on page 401 about the 'trap of empire' that seems to doom America, but at this point the reader may be laughing to hard to notice.

As I already said, I spent too much time on this book. I do think it's a good idea to see how other people think, but it's even better to base my thinking on evidence from the real world.

The Israel Lobby

Reactions to the Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt

I suppose that anyone who writes a review about this book that is even vaguely favorable must start out by saying they're not an antisemite. Well, I'm not. However I am anti-religious, especially when it comes to governments influenced by extremely religious people, and anti-fanatic, especially when it comes to anything. The Palestinians are a Semitic people anyway, though the sources say that the word "antisemitic" is usually specific to Jews in its usage.

The metaphor that came to me a few days after I finished this book was of the balance of blind justice, but with the fulcrum off center. In other words, what the so-called Israel lobby has done is move the fulcrum so that the human rights of the Israelis have lots of leverage and influence and even power in the American political system, while the various other considerations such as the human rights of the Palestinians or even America's own foreign-policy interests are practically without weight. On a physical scale, that would be like moving the fulcrum away from the Israel side, but the political situation is different, especially in that it is more multidimensional.

Overall their description of the situation seems quite insightful and accurate to me, and I've read a lot about the American political system and world history. The situation around Israel is exceedingly unreasonable, and there must be reasons why they can't reach any political accommodations for stable peace with their neighbors. Before reading this book, I felt that the primary obstacle was just the religious fanaticism of a relatively small group of Jewish extremists, but now I feel that the Israel lobby is quite significant, too.

The rational view of the situation is that Israel is a small country that can't indefinitely maintain hostilities against vastly larger enemies. The rational solution would be to engage in reasoned discussions in search of peace--but the example of the Israel lobby in America is that all reasoned discussions can by avoided, apparently indefinitely.

Happy for No Reason

Version 0.2

The American Love of Pseudo-science such as Happy for No Reason by Marci Shimoff

Justification is that Dubya would never admit he needed to be more happy, though he'd like the "no reason" part of it. Tie breaker is that the book is introspective and Dubya ain't, so he wouldn't read it.

The pseudo-science is supposed to be something like science of happiness.

The basic ideas are old, going back to The Power of Positive Thinking and similar books and similar motivational speakers.

Entire book is full of fake scientific veneer, though it was in Chapter 5, which is basically a plug for an obvious scam called the Institute of HeartMath. She tries to give them plausibility with a claim that it was verified by Stanford University and some other institute--but with no citation. Then you reread it more carefully and even the claim is meaningless. Maybe they rented a room in a building owned by Stanford? Nothing there. However, the kicker was the bogus graph, which is supposed to show pulse fluctuations over time as influenced by your mental state. It's easier to start with the supposedly good graph, which shows the pulse varying from 60 to 80 bpm--but within one minute. Wait a minute. Think about it. The pulse is about once a second, but from that data you are supposed to calculate smooth fluctuations in the average rate over the course of a few seconds? It's nonsense, which is exactly what the other graph shows. They are obviously playing some kind of game with the minor fluctuations, but the entire passage is just stuffed full of meaningless fake jargon and obviously false claims that are intended to sound scientific.

Other especially bogus and fraudulent claims involved the power of prayer and mental control over crystals (which was a Japanese scammer). Those are just some of the most glaring examples that came to mind now. Basically I just have to repeat it on a larger scale, the entire book is stuffed full of false claims that are intended to sound scientific.

I do think there is a tiny kernel of truth at the heart of the book. A positive attitude is a good thing and helps you in life. It's possible to be happier, though she never goes as far as saying that happiness is just a state of mind. It's one thing to be content and to adjust your expectations to be more content, but she's arguing for delusional states.

Another aspect that bothers me is the circular nature of the business. They basically endorse each other and help sell each other's books and classes and lectures.

A Short Comment on Interventions by Noam Chomsky

I just wanted to record a short reaction to the last part of his essay "The Social Security Non-Crisis" in this book. Though everything he says on the topic is sound, I myself feel that the most important argument for social security is one that he doesn't mention. Meaningful 'social security' frees people to enjoy their lives and spend their money while they are young enough to enjoy spending it, and spending that money and living more happily is also going to stimulate the economy by increasing the demands for goods and services that actually contribute to the demand for producing economic goods.

The REALLY free market alternative is that you should be trying to save lots of money while you are young, you should live like a total miser, because once you live one day beyond what you can pay for, you are free to start starving. I think the free market version works poorly because accumulating money is not a useful activity in itself, but more importantly because no one can see the future, so it is fundamentally impossible to guess how much money needs to be saved. I suppose the free market extremists could argue that everyone should try to save enough to live off the interest, but that fails the universality principle (as Chomsky usually refers to the Golden Rule). If everyone had a million dollars, the resulting devaluation of money is the same as if no one had a million dollars, so we're back to square one.

In general, and especially considering how upset his adversaries are, Chomsky's writing is remarkably boring and tedious. Not the consequences of his reasoning, which are often quite troubling, but in his presentation he simply focuses on very mundane facts and rarely resorts to anything resembling fancy analysis. Most of the time he just changes the actors to expose the hypocrisy. Perhaps the most interesting aspect is how clearly he separates words from the realities those words claim to describe--but perhaps that is only fitting for a linguist with such deep insight into the nature of language itself.

What Happened

Notes for a Review of What Happened (Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception) by Scott McClellan

Hmm... It appears that "what happened" here was that I wrote up the following notes as I was reading the book, but then lost interest in doing a full review. The book was weak enough that isn't worth much effort, and I guess that is about as negative as a review can get? I definitely don't feel like rereading the book to refresh my memories, so I guess I'll just summarize the main impression that remains some months after reading the book: McClellan seems like a nice guy, but incredibly naive, and even though he was physically inside the White House at the time, either he was completely outside of the real discussions or he is a much better liar than I think he is. My main conclusion from reading the book was that he was just an innocent patsy, and that's why his version of the events became so hopeless tangled once he started noticing reality again.

Cheney's secret plot really to plant WMDs or evidence of an Al Qaeda link to Saddam?

Lots of missing topics and incidents.

Detailed notes as I read:

Page 14: Silly mistake of "legendary successor's expense" in reference to Sam Houston, his "predecessor", not "successor".

Page 58: Glaring counterfactual statement about the Florida recount. Gore did suggest a statewide recount. (Only to be expected that there was no mention anywhere in the book of the eventual recount.)

Page 116: His own muddled typology of lying: "Partisans in Washington have become very sophisticated in the ways they murk it up with partial truths, political spin, misrepresentations, distortion, and an overall lack of intellectual honesty." No acknowledgment of his involvement in any of these things, but I guess it hit me harder since Walter Cronkite had passed away a few days before.

Page 132: "He doesn't worry about acknowledging the holes in his case or the valid points against his own arguments." Basically trying to defend his own approach to his job, not noting that such a lawyer would be utterly incompetent and would be blindsided and destroyed every time he walked into a courtroom.

Page 162: The insertion "later determined to be unfounded" (about Dubya's speech with the infamous 16 words about uranium) is a major self-contradiction. Elsewhere in the book he's noted that the claim had been debunked and removed from a prior speech. However, this is mostly part of the larger self-contradiction of acknowledging the Dubya White House was a bubble while treating it like the universe. (Reminds me of the joke about the mathematician who puts the fence around himself and announces "I define myself as outside.")

Pages 165-6: 'the fact that a president "didn't know" may not be a meaningful defense'. I'm not sure why he tried to confuse the issue with the double quoted "didn't know", but I am sure that ignorance of the law is NO excuse.

Page 177: Hadley is offering to resign for "an honest mistake" is either a radical definition of "honest" or another example of delusional in-the-bubble thinking.

Page 179: The reference to "gotcha reporting" is another example of belittling or misrepresenting his opponents for the kind of spin he never acknowledged using.

Page 181: Dismissing Karl Rove's opponents as "partisan critics". I wonder what other basis Rove could possibly be evaluated on? Is there any non-partisan metric for Rove?

Page 191: He actually includes the dishonest or incompetent case analysis. However, on the next page he just dismisses it as an image problem, not a fundamental paradox of bad government.

Page 229: I was struck by his "we employed" where he vaguely acknowledges his own contribution to the "spin and evasion", though the main thrust of the book was how that wasn't his intention.

Page 238: Seems to be a self-contradiction with Dubya's "French Toast" joke, but maybe it was somehow funny in context. On it's face, it seems to be the only example of Dubya's humor and a contradiction to McClellan's claim that Dubya is actually a funny guy.

Pages 278-9: Defensive story of Dubya's guitar photo during the Katrina fiasco as a problem in public relations and a failure of the staff to protect Dubya from these sorts of things. Overall another good example of the internal contradiction of trying to portray Dubya as a responsible leader who crucially depends on his staff.