LAPSES IN DISCOURSE ON THE OBAMA SIDE

This blog was never intended to be impartial; and it would be hard to believe that anyone has thought that impartiality is one of its virtues. Yet it has tried to avoid unqualified partisanship, even as it found more to quarrel with logically on the McCain side of the campaign than on the Obama side. To redress the balance, let us look at some recent lapses in logic or fairness on the Obama side. It is not true that the McCain people claimed that McCain had invented Blackberry; in the excerpt that was cited to this effect, they merely claimed that he had helped Blackberry become a success, a nice parallel to what Al Gore actually claimed about helping set up the Internet. Nor was it very convincing of the Obama side to make so much of McCain’s acronymic confusions, e.g., saying "FEC" when he meant "SEC." That was no more than a slip of the tongue. The commentators missed the possibility that in the Florida radio interview McCain, who at 72 probably does not have perfect hearing had heard "you" when the interviewer said "Europe." To be sure, even before that point in the interview, he had had trouble focusing on Spain rather than Latin America. However, the idea that he would refuse to meet with the Spanish prime minister was not anything that McCain expressed; it was a gratuitous invention of his campaign staff, aggravating confusion rather than reducing it. Commentators have said that Palin would have creationism taught in the schools, but they have often failed to make the point that she suggested teaching it alongside of evolutionism rather than instead. There may be objections to that, but they would have to be more inventive than objections to teaching it instead. Finally, though Palin may not invite much sympathy on most points, most of the time, the fuss that the commentators have made about her not being able to define "the Bush doctrine" has been greatly exaggerated. Could we count on a Harvard Phi Beta Kappa who follows political news insatiably to be able to define it? Charles Krauthammer has suggested, in a rarely reasonable moment, that a number of different things have been called "the Bush doctrine," and ex tempore attempts at definition by better minds than Palin’s have brought forth both "the imperial presidency" and "pre-emptive war."