"Meme Neutralizer"

A reader at TPM writes,

Don't you think that Republicans attacking Pelosi and CREW and bloggers over Foley is just like attacking Iraq when you know the crime was done by bin Laden? There they go again, Republicans attacking the wrong people when everyone knows who did the crime.

Ooh! I know the answer!.... Yes. They are the masters of the red herring, the ignoratio elenchi, as well as the enthymeme, the ad hominem (and genetic fallacy), the straw man, the reductio, the "ad nazium," and are pretty damn close to using the ad baculum.

Now we all know that politics is only rational a small-ish part of the time. Part of what makes politics interesting is not intentional deception through the use of manipulative language, but the fact that people do not behave "rationally" - whatever that means - much of the time. Many, perhaps most, people participate in politics through office, activism, or vote by following intuitions, emotional attachments and pre-set values and beliefs, and instrumental intelligence.

It's a little too dear to expect politics to function in some entirely rational way all of the time or maybe even much of the time. This expectation itself can sometimes serve as a kind of red herring for critics of a given policy or political maneuver. The policy or political behavior is held up against a rarefied ideal of rationality. That ideal may indeed be highly valuable and important as a critical tool - political criticism is often a matter of articulating better and more ideal ways of doing things and using that articulation to criticize existing practices. But the ideal ought not to be taken as fixed or a reality itself. When it is, holders of the ideal are easily painted as "unrealistic" and therefore outside of the realm of realities of politics. Idealistic political activists often run into this very problem. It's a fine line between intelligently using critical ideals as prompts to action and turning them into sacred precepts.

All this said, "rationality" - or I prefer "intelligence" - is, of course, an active ideal we shoot for while at the same time always and forever trying to develop what precisely we mean by "intelligence." This is the very grounds of a pragmatic and evolutionary notion of intelligence.

Political-rhetorical maneuvers based on the fallacies referred to above (and others) undercut the enterprise of attempting to be more politically intelligent and attempting to create more intelligent policy, even while the latter is always an imperfect process.

We move from logic into morality when this undercutting is done at the expense of others. The neocons and Republican leaders, holding on not to evolving ideals of political good, but admiring their own sterling Machiavellian manipulation of language and logic, allow themselves to settle into immoral policies and shift the blame to others - not only Democrats, liberals, gays, and other Republican bogeymen, but all American citizens and even world opinion. When up becomes down and down becomes up, when the administration and Republican leadership "define reality," we move from simply clever rhetoric into the realm of political totalitarianism.

And the very grounds of intelligent policy are sacrificed to the very grounds of immorality.