Show me the proof too

Editor and Publisher: New York Times vs. Dick Cheney, Round 3

EditorandPublisher.com - "The NY Times" versus Dick Cheney, Round 3

The New York Times > Opinion > Show Us the Proof

First of all, I can't really imagine NEEDING much more than the circular reasoning fallacy of President Bush's PRIMO quote after the 9/11 Commission issued its finding that there was no evidence of a "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and Al Qaeda in the terrorist attack that day: (anything this richly wonderful bears repeating)

"The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and Al Qaeda" is "because there was a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda."

This one really ought to go into the rhetoric and freshman comp textbooks alongside Nixon's "Checkers speech" in the logical fallacies chapter. It is better than any of the examples of circular reasoning that are usually listed in the textbooks.

The reason? The textbooks actually have to work hard to find an example of circular reasoning that sounds credible enough that a person would actually use it in an argument. Not that Bush's statement is credible, more like incredible, the idea that a person would say such a thing and wonder why audiences didn't fall all over themselves being persuaded by his massive reasoning prowess.

Anyway, E&P is having some fun with this. I had to pull a few juicy bits from their reports of Cheney going to bat for his boss's ridiculous reasoning.

Here you go:

But what must have really gotten the Vice President's goat was a Times editorial the same day. Noting the lack of evidence for an Al Qaeda/Iraq/September 11 link, it called on President Bush to "apologize to the American people, who were led to believe something different." It labeled as "plainly dishonest" the President's effort "to link his war of choice with the battle against terrorists worldwide."

Then the editorial chastised Cheney for "continuing to declare" a likely Saddam/bin Laden connection.

Well, Cheney wasn't going to take that hunkering down. The following day, appearing on TV, he called the Times coverage of the commission's findings "outrageous," sometimes "malicious." He said the "vaunted" newspaper did "a lot of outrageous things." (He probably was not referring to the paper's pre-war promotion of the Saddam/WMD link, which proved useful for his administration.) He continued to call evidence of the Iraq connection to Al Qaeda before the war "overwhelming."

Cheney also claimed "We still don't know" if Iraq had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks. For example, he said, the long-cited claim that chief hijacker Mohamed Atta met an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague in 2001 has "never been refuted." This seemed odd to some observers, since the commission staff had just declared that meeting could not have taken place, citing phone records and other evidence that Atta was in Florida at the same time he was said to be in Czechoslovakia.

[...]

The Times editorial, titled "Show Us the Proof," said it was "surprised by the depth and ferocity of the administration's capacity for denial." It observed that what Cheney called "longstanding ties" between Saddam and bin Laden so far amount amounted "to one confirmed meeting, after which the Iraq government did not help Al Qaeda. By those standards, the United States has longstanding ties to North Korea." Cheney, as usual, the newspaper said, "is not prepared to offer any evidence beyond the flimsy-to-nonexistent arguments he has used in the past."

You know the world is getting to be a VERY odd place when asking for proof of an argumentative claim is seen as a radical political act.

Postmodernists say we are all done with the Enlightenment and Enlightenment thinking.

The Enlightenment may have limited world views to anal and strict scientific rationalism that doesn't really hold up in the long run, but it is very peculiar how those these days who hold the most tightly to Enlightenment philosophies of authority and certainty have such a loose relationship with ideas of logic, proof, and even, with the Bush administration, the scientific method.

(could that be one of those examples of "postmodern irony"?)