For all their carping about ‘liberal dreamers,’ there are no more impractical and wild-eyed dreamers on the planet than Gingrich and his fellow Conservative Utopians. They love coming up with the kinds of ideas that college students used to have in the sixties when they were getting high in their dorm rooms. The difference is that the college students were straight again in the morning.
But in the halls of conservative think tanks, the lava lamps never stop burning.
Herman Kahn wrote a book called Thinking the Unthinkable in which he argued that the US could attack the Soviet Union and start a nuclear war and “win.” That laid the foundation for decades more of a pointless and costly arms race, and spawned a whole industry of intellectual agents provocateurs whose role was to challenge conventional thinking with “rule-breaking” brilliance – even when , especially when, the conventional thinking was right.
An entire right-wing think tank industry was spawned. That network generated many ideas that served large corporations, including the concept of an “individual mandate” compelling citizens to buy health coverage from an industry dominated by for-profit insurers. That’s why Newt endorsed the idea, when it was created for the purpose of undermining the Clintons’ health reform project. He’s only rejected it now because it undermines an even more important objective: defeating Obama.
Advocate is a stronger word than suggest: while “suggest” has a thesaurus comparable of advocate, with words such as propose, advise and recommend, the word advocate has such words as “supporter, promoter, believer” associated with it that are not included with suggest.
In this critique of a statement by David Brooks concerning Newt Gingrich once “’suggest[ing]’ building ‘a mirror system in space’ [that] could improve the Earth’s habitability,” my conservative counterpart (Bryan White) pulls a switcheroo with the words advocate and suggest. He also tries to pull off a faulty comparison with a “similar statement” made in a chain e-mail about Cass Sunstein in 2009, concerning suggesting a fairness doctrine for the internet.
In a way, Bryan White is trying to look like he is being “fair” and only arguing journalistic “standards” by inferring that a Republican should get less of a True while a Democrat should get more than a Half True. But his reasoning is that PolitiFact (PF) is trying to make it look “True” that Newt Gingrich has “crazy” ideas while downplaying less crazy ideas of Democrats to a more equivocal Half True. The answer is that while Bryan keeps asking “where’s the advocacy” the question for him should be “Where’s Newt’s disavowal?” For which he has no evidence.
The first problem with the 2009 chain e-mail Cass Sunstein statement comparison is feasibility: it’s not as feasible to put mirrors in space than it is to impose a fairness doctrine on the internet. That means the issue which can actually be done (“We also wanted to know whether this was ever a mainstream idea -- and whether it’s technologically feasible…”), which has no technological or cost factors impairing it, something more in line with conventional thinking, should come under greater scrutiny. If there was technology to cheaply put mirrors up into space tomorrow, we might have less than a true, because there’s more for writer Jacobson to check out. Then, there’s the fact that Newt Gingrich has made his niche in such “out of the box” thinking, as shown in my leading quote by Richard Eskow, a Senior Fellow with the Campaign for America’s Future.
My conservative counterpart seems to have found a subset or variant of the “liar’s paradox” in the way he juxtaposes “suggest” and “advocate” in his explanation of why PolitiFact has given a Republican a True for a seemingly outlandish statement while giving a Half True for the “same” to a Democrat. Once Bryan changes the terminology for Newt’s suggestion from suggest (clearly shown in the PF heading) to the stronger advocate, he stays with the word advocate throughout his piece. If you do a search on the Brooks PF piece, the word advocate never appears. But right through to the last sentence of his critique, it’s “It isn't relevant that Gingrich never specifically advocated the idea right through to the present day?”
The second problem with the ruling on Sunstein is the one crucial difference to the one on Brooks: it’s very, very clear that Sunstein “retracted” his position.
In a later edition of the book released in 2007, Republic.com 2.0 , Sunstein tempers that position, advocating instead for the creation of public spaces on the Internet where people with differing viewpoints could share their ideas with one another.
But in a video interview on the Web site Bloggerheads.tv on Feb. 29, 2008, Sunstein actually goes a little bit farther than that, calling it a "bad idea" he should never have ventured.
Asked to explain some of the differences between the first book, what Sunstein called "the initial inadequate edition," and its successor, Sunstein said, "To me, the most important (difference) is that the first Republic.com was full of some bad policy recommendations and I was able to get rid of those. So I feel the book has been corrected."
The conservative website World Net Daily wrongly published that he “advocated” a fairness doctrine for the internet even with his retractions. This was not the case with Gingrich’s statement.
It makes his argument more persuasive using the word “advocate” as if that’s what’s been used in PolitiFact’s article. But it’s just not true, right to the heading. He ignores the fact that unlike Gingrich, Sunstein repeatedly disclaimed his original statement. He also ignores the practicability of mirrors in space as opposed to putting a “fairness doctrine” on the internet. This is just one more case of Bryan getting in a stew when he sees author Lou.
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