Category: Journal

Another Thing You Know That’s Wrong

An enduring myth in the leftosphere is how George W. Bush’s economic policies have hurt the US economy.

As Larry Kudlow points out, the economy is doing just fine, only the media never seem to want to talk about it:

Stocks have been rising in recent weeks on the strength of a stronger than expected American economy, where resilient consumers and highly profitable businesses are outperforming the doom & gloom, cacophonous, cult of the bear on Wall Street.

Within shouting distance of 5-year highs, the bull market economy and stocks, backed by President Bush’s successful low tax rate program, continues to outperform the bearish consensus. It is the greatest story never told.

Weasels for Common Sense

I wonder, is Orson Scott Card, a moderately famous science fiction author, a weasel for saying that the burden of proof that George W. Bush is a liar is on those who claim he knew in advance, all evidence to the contrary, that Saddam Hussein did not posess weapons of mass destruction:

It was not a lie for Bush to state the information available to him and to all the intelligence services of other countries: That Saddam had poison gas, was pursuing bioweapons, and had a nuclear program designed to give him nukes.

Saddam’s own behavior, refusing to allow untrammeled inspections, did not look like the actions of an innocent man.

It turned out that there was no serious nuclear threat from Saddam. But the fact that we did not find the poison gas did not mean he never had it — we know he did. What it proved was that he either destroyed it, concealed it, or moved it to another country — with Syria the most likely candidate.

The most suspicious fact is that we found no evidence of the destruction of the poison gas. There would have been no reason for Saddam to conceal such destruction — he could have invited international observation of such actions and the world would have applauded.

Poison gas is not destroyed without leaving behind evidence. The lack of evidence of poison gas when we invaded Iraq does not suggest its nonexistence.

Card goes on to cite numerous, well, lies about George W. Bush’s supposed malfeasances.

Fun & Games

To keep my hand in the more technical side of computing, I’ve been working on a project whose goal is to develop a compiler suite. The first part of that project is a parser generator based on Bryan Ford’s work on Parsing Expression Grammars.

You will find the initial implementation at SourceForge. Right now it compiles on Windows (I’m using Visual C++ Express), but I’m working on getting it working on Linux.

Weasels for Logic and Objective Reality, Not To Mention Common Sense

I recently corresponded with a fairly prominent science fiction author on whose discussion group I occasionally lurk. It’s usually a fascinating discussion. But in one post they made a passing remark doubting something the Bush administration said, because he lied about the Iraqi WMD’s.

I emailed the author using the subject line “tedious political rant”, and asked why people who oppose Bush are so vehement in their opposition, when there are many reasonable people who do not make the a priori assumption that he is a nefarious villain. I pointed out that many prominent Democrat politicians waxed eloquent about Saddam’s WMD’s during the Clinton administration; that according to the UN, there were many weapons stockpiles unaccounted for after the 1991 war; and that the overwhelming consensus before the invasion was that Saddam posessed and was actively developing WMD’s.

How is it a lie, I asked, to state what one believes, even if that belief later turns out to be mistaken?

My correspondent responded by saying that Bush’s claim that these weapons were an imminent threat was the lie, and that anyone who claimed otherwise was “weaseling”.

But in the world of objective reality, Bush, in fact, claimed the opposite! In his 2003 State of the Union address, he said the following:

Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.

When I pointed this out, the author requested that I discontinue the correspondence, which I of course have, since I was the one who emailed first. But it makes me sad that otherwise reasonable people would presuppose someone’s guilt, and then back it up with evidence that is demonstrably untrue.

There seems to be such a huge world-view gap between those who believe Bush’s motives are always nefarious, and even those who believe that he just tries to muddle along like everyone else (not to mention the Bush-is-the-incarnation-of-Jesus-Christ-on-Earth folks :-).

After all, who would you rather believe, a stuttering former Texas governor, or a dictator with a record of aggression, WMD production and use, and (according to Human Rights Watch), a death toll of at least 30,000 people for every year of his reign?