ILLOGICAL DEBRIS AT THE END OF THE CAMPAIGN

22 October 2008

Again mindful of my aim to be not so partisan as to be unable to see defects in respect to logic on both sides, I note that Obama distorted McCain’s view that the U. S. might have to have some sort of presence in Iraq for a 100 years into readiness to go on fighting that long. Obama has also in charging that McCain proposes to cut Medicare payments to pay for his health plan lately made objectionably too much of some ambiguous statements in one newspaper article. Further examples of not keeping in strict truth to the point could no doubt be found. However, more striking abuses of logic are again to be found on the McCain side. The charge that Obama has been "palling around with terrorists" is a bundle of false suggestions, which have been sufficiently refuted by pointing out that he was eight years old when Bill Ayers was a terrorist, unacquainted with him, and living thousands of miles away and when he served with Ayers (along with a number of respectable Republican people) on the board of a community organization in Chicago Ayers was no longer a terrorist and Obama was far from having so much familiar contact with him as to be described as "palling around" with him. The refutation does not seem to have stuck in the thinking of the McCain campaign, however, which is still putting about the charge in robocalls. It was not fair of Keith Olbermann to suggest that Palin’s ignorant answer to a third-grader’s question about what the Constitution prescribes that the Vice-President do showed that she was no brighter than a third-grader. Brightness is another question; Palin is bright enough, and quick on the uptake, but her ignorance prevents the uptake from being effective with any thoughtful observer. The Vice-President is not in charge of the Senate; and would lose any influence with Senators if he (or she) pretended to be. Palin was caught out by her ignorance on the question of what newspaper she most relied on for information. If (as one might suspect) she was prepared to lie that she relied on some specific newspaper, she was unable to do so because she could not think of the name of any. It was not Palin, however, but McCain who distorted Biden’s prediction that the incoming president would soon face a major international crisis into a prediction that the incoming president would invite being tested by such a crisis. Then McCain went on to revive the confusion between taking part in a military operation as a pilot ordered to carry out specified flights and having experience related to the operation of making the strategic decisions that entailed the operation. McCain did not gain any experience of strategic decision-making from the Cuban missile crisis.