Rhetoric watch: Krugman on the disintegration of government

By Dan Brooks in Rhetoric 6 Comments

"Allowing our mascot to be hunted to near-extinction since 1849."

In the course of last Friday’s Link Roundup, we mentioned that members of the Department of the Interior tasked with regulating the oil industry were revealed to have “[taken] bribes and engaged in drug use and sex with oil industry officials” in 2008. That was awesome. In his New York Times column today, Paul Krugman promises more cops-‘n-robbers-get-together-to-do-coke-and-shout-out-the-window-of-the-squad-car frivolity with the headline, “Sex & Drugs & the Spill.” It turns out that’s just a come on, though, for a column about how anti-government sentiment can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is the kind of thing you need to do when you’re competing for eyes with Freakonomics. It’s like when Maureen Dowd wrote about the hot, throbbing need for derivatives regulation.*

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Lieberman to strip citizenship of guilty people, mostly

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse 1 Comment

Senator Joe Lieberman (I–CT) taking a bold stand against imagined guilty terrorists

Yesterday, we got all up in our heads about what the search for meaning in terrorist acts might possibly mean, and despite that sure-fire discursive strategy, things got a little abstract. Fortunately, we’ve got Joe Lieberman to bring us back to hard, unforgiving, maybe-taking-you-away-in-the-night-with-a-velvet-bag-over-your-head reality. In the wake of the arrest of Faisal Shahzad, the senator from Connecticut proposed legislation that would revoke the citizenship of Americans tied to terrorist organizations. Incensed at the news that Shahzad, a naturalized US citizen, had been read his Miranda rights after his arrest, Lieberman was joined in his outrage by Rep. Peter King (R–NY) and John McCain, who apparently has some kind of personal hypocrisy bucket list. The Paul Theroux Man of Straw Award has to be given to senator Chris Bond on this one, though, for saying that “We’ve got to be far less interested in protecting the privacy rights of these terrorists than in collecting information that may lead us to details of broader schemes to carry out attacks in the United States.” When an extrajudicial authority strips you of your American citizenship so that you can be imprisoned indefinitely without trial or sent to Egypt for interrogation, it’s not your privacy that’s violated.

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Terrorism and the absurdity problem

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse 2 Comments

Today in Slate, Timothy Noah asks, “Was the Times Square bomb the follow-on to 9/11 we’ve all been bracing for?” He’s not being funny, at least not on purpose. To Noah, Faisal Shahzad’s Nissan Pathfinder full of camping gas and fireworks, foiled by a t-shirt vendor when it smoked but did not explode, was the inevitable second strike. The enemy is extraordinarily subtle. From a list of sketchy connections that includes Shahzad’s claim to have received bomb training in Waziristan* and the arrest of one of his associates at a mosque in Pakistan connected to Jaish-e-Mohammed—”the same al-Qaida affiliate that five young Muslim Americans from Alexandria, Va., contacted in Pakistan this past December”—Noah deduces a global network, presumably biding its time until it could accumulate enough fireworks. “It would appear that a second shoe has dropped,” he writes. Here’s a tip for young journalists hoping to remind America of the omnipresent threat of terrorism: don’t say “shoe.”

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Rhetoric smackdown! Theroux vs. McCain on Arizona immigration law

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse 4 Comments

The other Citizen McCain

Thus far, Combat! blog has not mentioned the crazy immigration law that the great state of Arizona passed in April, in part because that state has already been fully captured and in part because there seemed to be only one side to the coin. Nobody thinks that random* proof-of-citizenship checks are a good idea. Nobody thinks that letting private citizens** sue cops for not performing said checks is a good idea. Like a novel about an old racist woman*** and a black orderly who become unlikely friends in a nursing home, the discussion was boring because no sensible person would put himself on the other side. Enter Paul Theroux. The travel writer is not a sensible person, and he’d be happy to explain to you why the Arizona law is no big deal. He even brought his own straw man. And there, on the horizon like a majestic ship, or maybe a jet ski detached from a much better ship, looms Meghan McCain, who argues that people should stop being angry at Arizonans. It’s straw man versus non sequitur, and only the old and/or politically well-connected will survive.

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