Sleep deprivation and its seasonal henchman, Christmas music that has reached toxic levels, have conspired to keep me from blathering for a few days. At a gig the other night, we had so many requests for Rudolph and Frosty etc. that a kind of aural snow blindness kicked in, and I had trouble remembering which song I was playing. At the end of the night, our singer had sustained a disconcerting jingle-bell-related injury, and between that and the army of excited children fortified by acres of accessible cake, I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say we barely made it out of there alive.
So, it's a compromised Karl Straub that's been trying to navigate this week's political landscape. The many bulletins about shifting FBI and CIA statements on the Russian hacking fooferaw have been both alarming and confusing, and factoring in the left-wing take on it (the Nation, etc.) along with the Trump kneejerk response and the varied grumbling on the right has made it impossible for me to explain my opinion in two or three sentences.
Wings both left and right are struggling to position themselves, for similar reasons.
Some on the right have been forced to choose between supporting their candidate and denouncing Russia. It's sort of like finding out that your current girlfriend may have been sleeping with a guy you've hated since you were kids. She denies it, of course. So what do you do? A good relationship is based on trust. And you've gotten in shouting matches already with a bunch of family and friends who don't trust her, so you've doubled down on the narrative that she's great, and their suspicions are unwarranted.
The left wing take is different, but problematic in an interesting way. Liberals are more or less united in assuming that every accusation we hear about this is true. Trump's blithe dismissal of the CIA's findings is cited as evidence that he's guilty, or at least as evidence of something. This morning we hear that the FBI and CIA are now more or less in grumpy agreement, like Hall and Oates discussing a contract rider about Green Room finger sandwiches.
But here's where it gets interesting.
For the real left (as opposed to liberals, or Democrats), the CIA's long history of deception and hubris-driven error makes them a dubious source for any assertion. This is where Trump's reflexive dismissal of the intelligence community becomes intriguing. He used the colossal WMD mistake as evidence that they should be ignored. This is a common type of rationalization for dismissal and discrediting of ideas that make you look bad, and is a smart play against anyone who hasn't been perfectly correct every moment of their lives. A political flack of my acquaintance once told me that this was an effective argument to use against the scientific community; "these are the same people who can't make up their minds about whether eggs are good or bad for us" was his framing of it.
The problem with this kind of "common sense" argument against science is that (like many examples of so-called common sense), it sounds wise but is actually stupid. Science is based on the idea that conclusions can and should be changed when new information is discovered. This is one reason why science has become a popular whipping boy in the American dialogue; political orthodoxy holds that changing your mind is evidence of corruption, cynicism, or incompetence. Beyond that, it must always be mentioned in defense of science that journalism about scientific breakthroughs is typically lazy and misleading. I've seen articles where the headline was clearly at odds with what the scientists said in the article. The media tends to prefer to write a story making science exciting, so when scientists say, "Don't forget, much more research is needed to determine which conclusions we should draw from this new study. It would be quite rash to assume, for example, that this means we can develop a pill that will help fat people eat as much ice cream as they want and still lose weight," the headline will be "Great News for Ice Cream Lovers!"
I call Trump's response reflexive for this reason. As all but the most dedicated Trump fans must have noticed by now, when Trump is criticized or questioned, he goes into bully defensive mode. Bullies reach for any criticism they can use to make a victim seem foolish and laughable. If it sounds good, it doesn't have to be even remotely factual, but a half-truth still tends to beat flat-out bullshit. So, in this case, Trump has a point. But, fortunately, so does Karl Straub.
Here it is: if an entity like the CIA makes mistakes, especially glaring ones which fuck up the planet for decades, it's entirely reasonable to be skeptical about their future statements. But it doesn't logically follow that they are always going to be wrong, and the logic is even thinner for the argument that since the CIA was wrong about that, Donald Trump's gut feeling will be right.
We all go with our gut much of the time, whether we admit it or not. We cherry-pick facts to bolster our gut feeling, and rely on "common sense" arguments when cherry picking seems like too much work. As far as I can tell, Donald Trump's only real conviction is that Donald Trump is always right. I seriously doubt whether Trump has ever heard of confirmation bias, or logical fallacies. If he has had thoughts about those insidious tendencies, he probably sees them as things liberals traffic in while conservatives do not.
Back to the left-- my friends on the left echo what perennially underfunded magazine The Nation tells us, that we can't really trust anything the CIA or FBI say. Thus, the hardcore leftists are consistent on this, rather than pretending (as some liberals are now doing), that Trump's refusal to accept the CIA findings is inherently heinous. I submit that his actual motives are despicable, but his skepticism is not inherently flawed or unjustified. It's presumably disingenuous, but this is one area where Trump doesn't live up to the popular image of him as a "crazy like a fox" evil genius. For those who are paying attention to the GOP and not just to Trump, there is plenty of resistance to Trump from the party he played like a violin. Where he deviates from the party wishlist, they will oppose him; sometimes weakly and sometimes ineffectively, and usually with great caution, but they will not just shrug their shoulders and let Trump be Trump. Here's why: they hold pretty good cards in their hands. Anytime they want to, they can impeach Trump for a host of reasons connected to conflict of interest. Trump doesn't seem to be cautious at all about concealing that side of his daily routine, probably assuming he doesn't have to worry about the party's allegiance to him. And as long as he does what they want him to do, he has nothing to worry about. He, or his inner circle, understand this, and they've taken some steps to inoculate him against criticism from either the right wing establishment crowd or the tea party cohort. But the establishment is well aware of Trump's tendency to go off script, and they are also aware that they can't completely control him. Liberals who eagerly fantasize about a Trump impeachment should consider what would happen in that scenario. Mike Pence is waiting in the wings, and his worldview is shot through with the most virulent of Jesus-backed ugliness.
No comments:
Post a Comment