Do Republicans Believe Their Own Reasoning?

We know that the Bush administration, with the help of Karl Rove, deliberately misleads Americans from time to time on various issues. Sometimes Karl Roves misguages how much he can fool the average American; a classic example was the Social Security bamboozlement that Bush tried to pull last year—nobody bought into Bush's fraud.

Even when they don't seem to be bamboozling the American people, I never know how much Republican politicians and officials buy into their own arguments. I do know that people like Karl Rove spend a lot of money finding out what appeals to focus groups and sometimes it's less important what a politician says, even if he or she is a buffoon, than how they say it. If you talk tough, Americans lap it up no matter how out to lunch your argument may be or how much evidence exists that the motivation for the arguments may lie elsewhere. Notice that every time Bush talks tough, the price of oil goes up and Bush's friends in the oil business are very happy.

Mahablog has an excellent post on Republican 'reasoning' or goofthink, as I like to call it:

Non sequitur is Latin for “it does not follow.” In English, non sequitur can refer to a response that has no relevance to what preceded it, or to a conclusion that does not follow from the premises.

(snip)

An example of a conclusion that does not follow the premise — If I am in Tokyo I am in Japan. I am not in Tokyo, therefore I am not in Japan. Since there’s lots to Japan beside Tokyo, the statement is illogical.

I’ve come to believe that righties think entirely in non sequiturs.

I mentioned this in a post last week — check out this bit from Friday’s Hardball:

REP. CHARLIE RANGEL (D) NEW YORK: I like to quote Rumsfeld, who said that he didn‘t know whether we were creating more terrorists than we‘re killing. And I think that the terrible way in which we have gotten involved in Iraq, have no clue about how to get out, inability to have any diplomatic policy, that we got young people who are Islam but of course have now found that people are being killed, and they are being recruited to do this terrorist work.

So we‘ve created an atmosphere, not of diplomatic resolution of this problem, but thinking that we can bring peace and freedom at the end of a rifle. And it‘s not working,

MATTHEWS: Your answer, Mr. Lungren?

REP. DAN LUNGREN [Rep. -CA] Well, we weren‘t in Iraq when we lost 241 marines in Lebanon,

Five-alarm non sequitur, that.

Lungren, as far as I can tell, is one of the more honest right wing Republicans from California, but, he is, after all, from Orange County where the illogic of the John Birch Society has held sway for decades. Justifying Bush's policy blunders by going back twenty-five years to a blunder that Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, made by committing American troops into an ambiguous situation before diplomacy was completely worked out is a very strange argument to make.

Be sure to read Mahablog's entire post. She offers a link to Eric Alterman of MSNBC's Altercation who has more to say on the strange reasoning passing for political discourse these days:

One the country’s most significant problems is the stupidity of our political discourse. It’s most obvious in cable news, but it’s everywhere, in print, on the net, on the Sunday shows, on the left, on the right, on the center. It’s not just inconvenient and annoying; it interferes without our ability to address our problems and allows thugs to get away with metaphorical murder. Here’s three examples, two of which involve me.

Joe Klein represents virtually everything wrong with political discourse in this country; he’s ignorant, insulting, self-satisfied and feels himself to be some sort of victim. Witing about Connecticut, he complains of the “expected torrent of rubbish from left-wing blognuts and conservative wingnuts….nauseating triumphalism …. unblinking assertion… stupid excesses” and that’s just in the first few paragraphs. It’s all typical Klein but what caught my eye was the end, where he describes “bipartisan moderation” as “the highest form of patriotism” here. Oh really? What if the “center” goes off the rails, as in Iraq; as in the present economic policy? The Medicare bill? Etc, etc. Klein says, “Agree or else: dissent is unpatriotic.” Where does it end, Joe? Just a little bit of torture? A touch of illegal spying? Throw away half the bill of right[s]?

I don't understand the logic of people like Joe Klein. If liberals, moderates and even some conservatives say 2+2=4 and the right wingers come out and say 2+2=6, Joe Klein is one of those maddening 'moderates' who stick their fingers up in the air, and wedge themselves into the middle by splitting the difference: ahh, says Joe Klein, both sides are fools; it's obvious that 2+2=5. We're stuck with a president who has a philosophy fifty years out of date and we need analysts and journalists who can recognize that the problems of the 21st century are already here and they're being badly ignored because of 25 years of the Republican noise machine. We need to get back to the future.