Mainstreaming Nonsense

Mainstreaming Nonsense:

I've been trying to decide what to say about this essay on intelligence and education among conservatives. I value both qualities, certainly. I ought to want to endorse a call to them. And yet... what value is there in denouncing "Joe the Plumber," simply because he wasn't a genius? He never said he was a genius. He said he wanted to work hard and build his fortune, and he didn't care for the idea that then-candidate Obama wanted to "spread the wealth around."

Well? Shouldn't he be able to say that? If he was right about nothing else in his life, wasn't he right about that?

John McCain knew he was:





The essay with which we began bothers me still more as I see Ed Morrissey's piece today:

With the resignation of Van Jones for his 9/11 Truther flirtations (his version) or outright advocacy (which the evidence indicates) and the humiliation of the traditional media deliberately leaving themselves and their consumers behind the New Media on the story, the reaction will come, but not soon. Instead, we can expect the media to hold Republicans to the standards the conservative punditry imposed on Van Jones, and to be a lot more aggressive about it than they were with Jones himself.

What exactly does that mean? In the next Republican administration, we can expect a great deal of scrutiny for Presidential advisers. For one thing, it means that no one who ever expressed public support for Birthers to get the benefit of the doubt. The two conspiracy theories are different, but they both are entirely speculative and imagine dark conspiracies at the highest orbits of power, and neither have any actual direct evidence for support.

I have no beef for the Birthers, who have managed to interest me twice: once, when a friend sent me what he misunderstood and represented to me as a Federal court order stating that Obama had lost his citizenship; and again when the argument was laid out in its full form. It was on this second occasion that I realized how unjust the argument was: for it to hold, you have to agree to endorse the idea that an American citizen who is a woman cannot pass her citizenship to her son, if her husband is not also a citizen. Any child of mine should be an American, even if I had married a woman who was no citizen. If the law said otherwise, the law was wrong.

Nevertheless, I don't think I like the idea that membership in a minority position disqualifies you from service. What if you were part of the small cult who believed Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction? You would, in 2002, have been as directly in violation of the conventional wisdom as Birthers or Truthers; in violation of the opinion of intelligence services across the several free nations, and multiple US administrations.

You'd also have been right -- against the odds and all reasonable interpretations of the evidence, to be sure. Right, nonetheless. If by some circumstance we had not gone into Iraq in 2003, we would not now know that you were right. It would be hard to imagine that you could be.

"Fringe" movements do sometimes get things right that the majority cannot imagine to be true. This is an exercise in humility: to admit not only that we are not as wise as we think, that we might be wrong, but that most of us could be wrong, that almost all of us could be wrong, that all of us could be.

We could be. Even most of us. Even all of us. In fact, to me, it seems more likely than not that we are usually all wrong.