Friday, September 08, 2006

Bull Indeed

Of all the Lieberman-Lamont race commentary in existence, this might be the dumbest.
The Moose argues that there is only one real Democrat in the Connecticut Senate race.

...

Here is a thought experiment - who would Senators Truman, JFK, LBJ, HHH and Scoop be more comfortable with - Joe or his opponent? They would no doubt embrace Joe as one of them.

Lieberman, the real Democrat.
Who would any of those people endorse in this race? Presumably they would endorse the actual Democrat. But really, who cares?

Scoop Jackson supported Japanese internment during World War II. The Moose apparently thinks that Lamont ought to adopt a similar line toward Muslims in the U.S. today, so that when Bill & Ted bring Jackson to Connecticut in 2006, he'll be "more comfortable" with the idea of voting for Lamont.

Or something.

2 comments:

Tommaso Sciortino said...

Well, we don't exactly expect sound comentary from the Anne Coulter of the passionate middle.

This kind of touches on the interesting question of where political figures from the past would actually place themselves on today's political specturm. I mean, Lincon would be uncomfortable with the color-blind left of today though I'd like to image that he'd eventually either come around to the modern way of thinking when confronted with new facts - or at worst - just decide he's dispositionally incompatible with conservatives of any era even if they're the only ideology with room for an anti-miscegenation wing.

Paul said...

Presumably - or at least hopefully - the "point at hand" is that Lieberman is, by virtue of the merits of his positions, the preferrable candidate. Certainly it is a trivial point that the collective views of Democrats today are different than the collective views of Democrats at various points in the past, so that couldn't be all that was meant. Again, hopefully.

The post I linked to does little or no discernable argumentative work to the effect that Lieberman is the better candidate. Instead, it looks to me like the author wants to imply the vindication of his own beliefs with an argumentum ad verecundiam.

It is left entirely unsaid why we should care what these apparently mythical figures would think about the Lieberman-Lamont race, or even why we should so blithely assume they'd think Lieberman is right about anything at all.

Nobody should be so easily shamed into uncritically honoring tradition, political or otherwise.