Not Enough Clichés for This

Strap yourselves in folks, it's going to be a bumpy ride. 

That's just another cliché making the rounds these days as we head into uncharted waters, so to speak.

For the purpose of this post, last Tuesday evening I held my nose and sat through a speech the exPOTUS gave at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, a few hours after he was indicted for a second time.

Predictable in so many ways, that speech featured wall to wall hyperbole, logical fallacies, misleading statements, outright lies, a few pronouncements taken directly from the How to be a Dictator for Dummies Handbook, and other stuff that could best be described as nothing more than unadulterated bullshit. I'll detail just a few of those in a minute.

The one thing that separated this speech from his typical whiney rants of the past was that it featured an unusual amount of self-pity, even for him, not a good look for someone who likes to pretend he's a tough guy. In reality a diva if there ever was one, 45 made it clear to his adoring public that the great tragic operatic heroines, Aida, Madama Butterfly and Lucia di Lammermoor combined, have nothing on him as far as suffering and being victims of indignity, maltreatment, and injustice. Paraphrasing the old Negro spiritual, to the MAGA cult who sees their guy as a latter-day Jesus Christ, nobody knows the trouble he's seen. 

To the rest of the world, he's exactly where he belongs, as a criminal defendant.

As they say, what goes around, comes around.

So on to the speech, shall we?

One year ago, I wrote this piece on logical fallacies, that is to say, arguments that do not reasonably follow from their premises. In my post I listed about a dozen categories of logical fallacies (there are many more) and can honestly say the exPRES used virtually all of them Tuesday evening.

Here I'll mention only three, the ones with fancy Latin names, just because they make me sound smart:

Logical fallacy number one: The post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy with not a little hyperbole thrown in. On Tuesday evening, the exPOTUS opened his speech with this:

The ridiculous and baseless indictment of me by the Biden administration’s weaponized Department of Injustice (sic) will go down as among the most horrific abuses of power in the history of our country.

Post hoc, ergo propter hoc, in English "after this therefore because of this", concerns the misconception that subsequent events are necessarily connected to preceding ones. In this case, the exPOTUS's legal prosecution follows the presidency of Joe Biden, therefore according to him, the Biden administration, and specifically Biden himself, are directly responsible for the prosecution of the exPOTUS. 

The following is the core argument of the exPOTUS: 

A corrupt administration, Biden's, is actively prosecuting a political rival who is likely to face him in the 2024 presidential election. 

This is a very serious charge, one that should never be taken lightly, especially in a democracy.

We'll never know if Joe Biden is directly or indirectly responsible for the prosecution of 45, but logic and everything I've seen up to this point leads me to believe that both are extremely unlikely. For starters, the current president has bent over backwards to distance himself from his predecessor. He has made it abundantly clear that in his administration, the Justice Department works independently of the Office of the President, as it is designed to do. To further that point, an independent counsel, Jack Smith was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland, to investigate and if necessary, prosecute this case, further distancing Biden and the Justice Department from the travails of the exPOTUS. 

OK but what if Biden is lying and really is working behind the scenes to ensure that the case against the exPRES moves forward? That's where logic comes in.

Joe Biden is not a dumb man. He understands that 45 needs attention, even negative attention, like a fire needs oxygen in order to survive. I believe that if the current president truly is working behind the scenes to remove the exPOTUS from the race, he would do everything in his power to avoid giving 45 more oxygen in the form of public attention. The media circus that has developed around 45's two indictments, and surely more to come, is the last thing Biden needs if he is truly afraid of the exPOTUS and wants to keep him out of the headlines.

Biden also knows that 45 (who is hoping to become 47) is a proven loser. While he may be the odds-on favorite to win his party's nomination, he is the least likely of four or five of his Republican opponents to defeat Biden in the general election in 2024. A conviction of the exPOTUS would almost certainly energize more than just the MAGA base to come out to vote for the Republican candidate, whomever that may be. There's no telling where that road might lead but a conviction probably would not be helpful for the Democrats' cause in 2024.

Furthermore, should 45 be convicted, you can bank on any future Republican administration, with or without the exPOTUS in charge, much like the Mob, seeking retribution and coming after Biden and his family in Congress and the courts with all their might. 

Which leads us to the following cliche, currently the mantra of the Republican Party:

The exPOTUS said as much Tuesday promising that if elected president in 2024, he:

...will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family.

In other words, he would do exactly what he is accusing Biden of wrongly doing right now, weaponize his Justice Department against his political enemies. 

Unlikely as it may be, it is not inconceivable that 45 could become 47 in '24 and I certainly wouldn't put it past him to do just that, or at least try. After all, he has a proven track record as president of using his attorney general as his personal attorney. 

Simply put, no matter how much Joe Biden would like to see justice done, prosecuting 45 does not work in the current president's self-interest. It seems ridiculous to me that he would actively work toward that end, rather than letting the chips fall where they may, which I have no doubt is exactly what he's doing.

Logical fallacy number two: The tu quoque fallacy.

Translated into English, "you too", the tu quoque fallacy occurs when rather than explaining one's own position, someone turns an argument back on the opponent, citing inconsistencies or hypocrisy in their position. A more current and familiar term is "whatboutism". In the speech after his latest indictment, 45 spent a considerable amount of time listing other prominent figures who did what he is charged for, wrongfully maintaining records of government information, some of it highly classified, in their possession after leaving office. The exPOTUS was indicted for his actions while the others were not. This is correct. What he conveniently left out is that all the others he mentioned, the Clintons, Joe Biden and Mike Pence, all cooperated with authorities to return the material in their possession back to the government. 

In stark contrast, 45 did not cooperate, in fact according to the indictment, he went to extreme, illegal measures to prevent the government from getting their hands on the documents, many of them containing very sensitive information regarding national security.

As a friend commented on Facebook: comparing 45's acts to those of the other politicians "is not like comparing apples to oranges, it's comparing apples to hand grenades."

Logical fallacy number three: The ad hominem attack.

Attacking the opponent, rather than addressing the argument, is what defines the ad hominem (to the person) fallacy. It also happens to be the favorite rhetorical device of the exPOTUS. It's almost inconceivable to think of a 45 speech without hearing stock put downs like "these are very bad people" or "this is a low IQ individual" or "so and so is a nasty person" if the target happens to be a woman. Like a schoolyard bully, the bigger the threat to 45, the harsher the put down. The really privileged get a personal nickname. Who could ever forget "Crooked Hillary" Clinton or "Rocket Man" Kim Jung Un?

Perhaps the biggest threat the exPRES has ever experienced up to this point in his career is the Special Counsel in this case. True to form, he is the beneficiary of the harshest nickname of them all, "Deranged" Jack Smith. I imagine the nickname doesn't come from Smith's highly regarded professional reputation, but from his headshot that made the rounds, where he's sporting a full beard and an intense gaze, making him look shall we say, a little sinister. But as we all know, you can't judge a book by its cover, Smith's work on this case has shown nothing but intelligence, thoroughness and competence, very unfortunate indeed for the exPRES. No wonder he hates him so.

Then there's his name. 45 displayed some of his tribal instincts when he said:" I wonder what his real name is. Jack Smith, sounds so innocent, doesn't it?" I guess to him, a white guy with a very common Anglo-Saxon name is someone he would automatically trust, as opposed to someone with a name like Barack Hussein Obama for an example.

What these logical fallacies have in common is they deflect from the issue at hand, in this case the crimes the exPOTUS is accused of committing. In fact, all the defenses I've heard from apologists for the exPOTUS, both the true believers and those who are simply afraid of crossing him and maybe getting a nickname of their own, have not once addressed what is actually in the indictment. "I guess..." suggested one commentator, "you can't defend the indefensible." Instead, they just throw a bunch of nonsense against the wall to see what sticks. (I do love that cliché).

On Tuesday evening however, the exPOTUS did bring up the charges.

Logical fallacies alone do not invalidate a premise. Claiming that an issue cannot be true because its defender uses faulty logic is known as the fallacy fallacy, I kid you not.

Making stuff up is another story.

The secondary argument of the exPOTUS is this:

I did have the documents in my possession, but I had every right to do so. 

During his Tuesday speech, the exPOTUS kept bringing up the "Presidential Records Act" which he claimed gives presidents leeway to take their time in order to make the decision as to which records could be kept and which should be relinquished.

I must say 45 made a good case for himself citing an act of Congress from 1978 that I'm assuming few average Americans, myself included, knew much if anything about. Given my ignorance on the subject, I did what most reasonable people would do, I looked it up, not hard to do these days. 

Lo and behold, The Presidential Records Act states exactly the opposite of what the exPOTUS claimed.

According to the Presidential Records Act of 1978, the president is required to relinquish ALL documents relating to affairs of the government, classified or not, as soon as he or she leaves office. 

This is neither my opinion nor conjecture, it is an unequivocal fact. Here is section 2022 of the Act which deals with the ownership of presidential records:

The United States shall reserve and retain complete ownership, possession, and control of Presidential records; and such records shall be administered in accordance with the provisions of this chapter.

And from Section 2203, dealing with the management and custody of presidential records:  

Upon the conclusion of a President's term of office, or if a President serves consecutive terms upon the conclusion of the last term, the Archivist of the United States shall assume responsibility for the custody, control, and preservation of, and access to, the Presidential records of that President. The Archivist shall have an affirmative duty to make such records available to the public as rapidly and completely as possible consistent with the provisions of this chapter.

If you don't believe me or think I'm taking this out of context, you can read for yourself the Presidential Records Act here.  

Of course, 45 is only preaching to the choir. He has so little faith in the curiosity and the intelligence of his followers, that he doesn't think twice about telling them easily debunked falsehoods, assuming they wouldn't dare question him. For many I'm afraid, that's true. 45 could tell them up is down and down is up and before you know it, they'd be walking on their hands. 

Unquestioning people like these can be easily manipulated, so when a former president whom they adore tells them as he did last Tuesday:

They're not coming after me, they're coming after you.

They believe him. A lot of them do.

And as Republican former gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake so eloquently pointed out, many of them have guns. 

So, this week when friends and family members asked me what I thought about the indictment, I responded with the most pertinent cliché of all:

We have to be careful what we wish for. 

Logical Fallacies

In my last post I brought up something that has been irking me for quite some time, people who use Chicago's high murder rate to make the point that relatively strict gun control laws, which this city also has, do little if anything to prevent murder. I mentioned that were there any credence to the conclusion , I'd support it, but pointed out that the argument is flawed in many ways and is not at all credible. 

For starters, the argument uses a single piece of evidence to draw its conclusion. In this case, using only the data of murder rates and gun laws in one city is insufficient because many other examples (those of other cities), need to be studied in order to come closer to a valid conclusion. Using only one example to draw a conclusion is known as an anecdotal fallacy. Every high school freshman learns in science class that you cannot make a conclusion based upon the evidence gathered in one solitary experiment.

The term cherry picking is also relevant here because data in the form of crime statistics for every city in this country, are readily available and not all of it backs up this particular conclusion. Instead, advocates of this theory select Chicago's anecdotal evidence of a high murder rate combined with strict gun laws specifically because it fits into their theory, while purposefully not bringing up comparable cities with strict gun laws and low murder rates or cities with high murder rates and lax gun laws. 

Another logical fallacy which often goes hand-in-hand with the anecdotal fallacy has a fancy Latin name: "post hoc, ergo propter hoc", in English: "after this, therefore because of this." It's the classic cause and effect question, assuming that if one event precedes another, it must be related to the subsequent event. In this particular case it is assumed the first event, strict gun laws, do not affect the murder rate, which is high despite them. This is a like a student who does poorly on a test despite studying for it, concluding that studying for all tests is useless. Never mind that there may have been dozens of reasons why the student didn't do well on the test, or the proposition that had he not studied at all, he may have done even worse on the test. 

I became interested in the subject of logical fallacies while writing that post. I looked it up and found hundreds of websites devoted to the subject, (no, I didn't look at them all). My philosophy class in college over forty years ago probably covered much of this material, but like the subject of how to factor a quadratic equation, the Spanish subjunctive and many other things I learned in school, I forgot. 

Yet another popular fallacy is the strawman fallacy. The premise of the SF is that someone making an argument misconstrues or exaggerates the opposing position, then uses arguments based upon those  faulty assumptions. This exaggerated position is designed to be easy to take down rhetorically, hence the term "strawman."

A classic example of the Strawman Fallacy can be found in my penultimate post where I talked about Tucker Carlson's evaluation of Joe Biden's address to the nation on the importance of gun control a couple weeks ago. In his rant, Carlson accused Biden of wanting to "disarm" Americans, which the president took great pains in his speech to make clear was not true.  Carlson went on to use the fallacious idea of "disarming Americans" (in this case, the strawman) to go in several directions, including portraying Biden as a tyrant who wants to take guns away from the American people in order to gain total control of them, as disarming the public has been the first act of tyrants throughout history. That last part is an example of another logical fallacy, the slippery slope. More on that one later. 

The point of this exercise is not to find more "gotcha" moments in the news to criticize a certain sector of our population which I've done a lot of lately if you hadn't noticed. Rather, I'm trying to clean up my own act, hoping to be aware of logical mistakes in my own arguments. 

Turns out I make them all the time. Here's a doozy from the last post:

I guess it shouldn't be surprising that (Texas governor Greg Abbott) would bring up Chicago while blocks away, grieving parents were in the process of receiving the remains of their murdered children who had to be identified the night before by DNA samples as the bullets from a high-powered military grade weapon ripped apart their bodies and destroyed their faces.

That's an example of the appealing to emotions fallacy. It's debatable whether or not my statement itself constitutes a fallacy as nothing in it is untrue, in fact I may have even downplayed the gruesome nature of the aftermath of the Uvalde tragedy. Nor was any of what I said not relevant to my argument as the slaughter of innocent people, in this case children, is precisely why I believe we need more gun control. Yet the statement obviously is manipulative. I could have left out the gore and just said the governor brought up the Chicago fallacy while he was in Uvalde attempting to lend support to the people of that community in their time of need, then left the judgement of the appropriateness of the governor's words up to my readers. 

Just one paragraph earlier, I brought up Governor Abbott's blaming wind energy for the crippling Texas power grid crisis of last year, despite the fact that wind accounts for a very small amount of the energy produced in Texas. 

I originally led the paragraph quoted above with: "I guess it shouldn't be surprising that such a great mind, this modern-day Don Quixote..." (going after windmills, get it?), "would bring up Chicago..."

This is a good example of the ad homiem fallacy, or an attack not against the argument, but "against the man" making the argument. In this case, the subject of Abbott's statement about energy last year had nothing to do with his statement in Uvalde, and my ironic "great mind" line attacks the governor's intelligence (really his sincerity), rather than the argument at hand.

A couple weeks ago I was reading the comments section of an article about the highly publicized mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde. The comments were predictable, many of them pro-gun control, many of them anti. After one fairly strident comment emphasizing the need to keep our children safe from being killed in their schools, someone commented to that remark by saying this: "But you have no problem with abortion?"

I was partially appalled and partially stymied by that one as I had no good response for it. OK yes, they are two separate issues, but they are both issues concerning life and death and I can understand that some people see an inconsistency with people who are concerned about preserving the lives of school children but unconcerned about preserving the lives of unborn children. Conversely, I've read comments from the other side that say anti-abortion people are only concerned about children's lives if they are not born yet. I've made that argument myself on numerous occasions.

These are both examples of another logical fallacy with a fancy Latin name, tu quoque, or the "you too" fallacy. It's also referred to as the "look who's talking" or my personal favorite: "the pot calling the kettle black" fallacy. Tu quoque is avoiding an argument by turning it around on the opponent by pointing out his or her inconsistency or flat-out hypocrisy. In recent years it has become so common in political discourse that a new word has been coined to describe it, "whataboutism." 

Whataboutism is a favorite tool of Vladimir Putin, who descends from a long line of Russian dictator whatabouters. He has used it consistently during his war against Ukraine, excusing his actions by saying other nations, especially the United States have invaded countries as well. Another great whatabouter is Donald Trump whose most infamous use of the fallacy concerned none other than Putin. In a 2017 interview with Bill O'Reilly, the former FOX News personality questioned the new president about his admiration of the Russian dictator, referring to him as a "killer." Trump's response was chilling: 

There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What do you think — our country’s so innocent?

 That line prompted this astute response from the current U.S. National Security advisor Jake Sullivan:

The American president is taking Putin’s 'what about you' tactic and turning it into 'what about us?'

Supporters of the exPOTUS are famous for using whataboutism in their defense of 45, saying things like: "yeah he may be a crook with no moral or ethical compass, but so are all politicians."

Logical fallacies are not the exclusive domain of one political ideology. Case in point, in one of the web sites I checked out dealing with the subject, the author used this quote from Barak Obama to illustrate the false dilemma fallacy:

What choices are we going to make to reach that goal? (a balanced budget). Either we ask the wealthiest Americas to pay their fair share of taxes, or we are going to have to ask seniors to pay more for Medicare.

As we saw above, logical fallacies needn't be limited to one category; here Obama is clearly guilty of appealing to the emotions, after all, who doesn't have more compassion for seniors on a fixed income than for the "wealthiest Americans"? But the false dilemma fallacy which this quote also illustrates, poses one of only two possible outcomes to an action, one very bad, and the other good or at least, not as bad. There is no middle ground.

The slippery slope fallacy mentioned above, is related to the false dilemma in that it is poses an exaggerated assumption of the outcome to an action. The slippery slope argues that one thing inevitably leads to another, that is, if a particular action is taken, it will cause another action that will result in a bad outcome which will in turn result in another action resulting in a worse outcome, and so on. The classic example of this is a parent warning a child that if he doesn't do well in school, he'll end up being homeless because if he gets bad grades, he won't into a good college, then won't get a good job, etc.

I used the slippery slope in a piece I wrote about abortion. I posed the hypothetical suggestion that banning abortion in selected states may lead to a situation where an act that is perfectly legal in some states may land someone on death row in another. While there have been rumblings of a few people who say they might support the death penalty as punishment for those who perform abortions, there is no evidence to suggest that is a real possibility. Yet. So my statement would fall into the slippery slope category. 

Perhaps one of the most insidious of fallacies is the appeal to common sense fallacy. Anyone who has successfully lived through years of life on this planet has learned through personal experience certain things that will greatly improve their quality of life, things like knowing if you go out into the rain without an umbrella or protective clothing, you will get wet. We call the kind of knowledge that does not have to be taught, common sense. Of course, not everybody's personal experience is the same, someone who grew up in an arid zone may actually welcome getting wet in the rain because it is so rare where they come from and would never consider covering up to stay dry. 

Sometimes we see our own experience as transferrable to everybody else and don't even consider the possibility that other's may see things from a different perspective. 

Appealing to common sense is a way of avoiding an argument by saying the argument is so obvious it needn't be elaborated upon, and anyone who isn't on board with it is either unreasonable or stupid. A hypothetical example would be saying it is common sense that the combination of Chicago's strict gun laws and high crime rate is proof that gun laws don't work. How could any reasonable person not see that?

I am guilty of abusing the appeal to common sense fallacy in my own arguments, in fact there's a good example in this very post, see below.

It's important to remember that some arguments may technically fall into one of the categories of logical fallacies, but still constitute reasonable arguments. A borderline example is the appeal to authority fallacy. In this one, the committer of the fallacy uses the statements or beliefs of a third party, "the authority", to make an argument. 

A relevant example of this one is the use of Dr. Anthony Fauci as an authority figure on the subject of infectious diseases. An argument may go something like this: 

• Person one: How do you know that wearing masks helps prevent the spread of COVID?
• Person two: Because Dr. Fauci says it does and Dr. Fauci says...

Here person two is letting Dr. Fauci's expertise make the argument rather than making the argument himself. Is this a fallacious argument as it is clearly an appeal to authority?

Well, Dr. Fauci has spent an entire career, over fifty years, studying infectious diseases so he should know something about the subject. 

• Does this mean his opinions on the subject are infallible? No. 
• Is he immune from making errors of judgement? No.
• Is his the only credible opinion on the subject? Certainly not. 
• Is his opinion on the subject more valid than that of a layperson who has spent a couple hours reading articles on the web questioning the efficacy of wearing masks? YES, IT CERTAINLY IS!!!

So while saying: "Because Dr. Fauci says so" may not be a particularly elegant, well thought out argument, as far as the subject of infectious diseases goes, it is a reasonable argument.

If on the other hand the argument at hand is who is the most valuable player in the National League this year or what is the best wine to serve with Weiner Schnitzel, Dr. Fauci's opinion may not carry much weight, and the appeal to the authority of Dr. Fauci on those subjects would indeed be fallacious. 

The fallacy that usually wraps up discussions on logical fallacies is the fallacy fallacy, which assumes that because a person uses fallacious logic to make an argument, the argument itself is wrong.

It is possible that strict gun control laws don't affect crime very much, despite the fact that the evidence supporters of that theory promote is flimsy. If we really wanted to prove that gun laws don't affect crime here in Chicago, there is a straightforward experiment we could conduct to see if that has any merit. 

Get rid of our gun laws and see where that takes us. 

In an ideal world, I think few reasonable people would be willing to conduct that experiment. But we're living in a less than ideal world with fewer and fewer reasonable people (a whopper of an appeal to common sense fallacy), and as of this week in its infinite wisdom (ooh an ironic comment that could be considered an ad hominem attack), the Supreme Court has shown it is willing to conduct that dangerous experiment as reflected in its overruling New York State laws preventing people from carrying guns in public. 

Yes, there was another notorious ruling released by the court this week also promising horrendous consequences for our nation (do I detect a slippery slope here?), but that's an issue for another day. 

I don't want to get involved in yet another logical fallacy by comparing the two, although I'm not exactly sure which category it would fall into. 

Or by simply bringing it up, maybe I already have.

Oh well, so be it.