SNAFU of the Decade?

Do we have any Republicans or Democrats around here? I'm just a bit curious to know what those parties are doing or saying about this minor matter.

Ben Stein's Gone

In an attempt to put up a conservative of interest, I put up a link to Ben Stein's pages. I've removed it.

My trouble stems from an interview on a Christian TV network that covered, in part, the so-called movie Expelled. (Go to April 21 and find Ben.) I was going to let him get away with that one before I heard about the interview. At one point in the interview, Ben Stein says

When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. Myers [a scientist interviewed in the "movie"], talking about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed. ... Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place, and science leads you to killing people.

This isn't about politics, it's about a complete lack of connection to reality. Minimally, I expect everyone but politicians to have one. If he were kidding about this, I would be amused... as long as everyone knew it was a joke. I can't see how this is a joke, and my sense of humor is as obtuse as the come.

I'll put Ben back up as a person of interest when he runs for a public office that deserves this crap.

Is That a Real LIberal I See?

Nope, just Ralph Nader. Drat.

Um... Logic?

Hillary Clinton says

"It's about picking a president who relies not just on words, but on work, hard work, to get America back to work," Clinton said at a labor rally here. "Someone who's not just in the speeches business."

Okay, let's do some formal logic. I'm going to do this sloppily and not state my assumptions, but it's all valid.

Two Democratic candidates, assume we pick one. We have a disjunction! Let's call this disjunction Democrat = [Obama OR Clinton]. For now we need not care if it's an OR or an XOR, but really it is XOR because only one will win the nomination. Using disjunction Democrat, from not Obama we can deduce Clinton. (Look up modus tollendo ponens.)

Unfortunately, I think Hillary is falling flat on this one. Why? Because her way of saying "not Obama," which I quoted above, could also be saying "not Clinton." There's nothing invalid about taking the argument in that direction, however; we can still get a valid result. For both inclusive and exclusive OR, when both arguments are false the disjunction is also false. So Democrat is false. The "spring" disjunction Democrat is one argument of the "November" disjunction [McCain OR Democrat]. With Democrat false, McCain is true.

Valid conclusion-- Clinton wants us to vote for McCain.

Of course, now that we know it's valid, we need to know if it's sound. (I made two mistakes that can ruin the soundness. Have fun finding them!)

[Nate back to add: And people told me that a semester of logic in the philosophy department at college would never be good for anything! Ha! Second best electives I ever took, after Coaching Football.]

what's a McCain, after all?

Everyone knows that liberals are baby-killing tax-raising gun-hating flag-burning global-warming Satanist evolutionist atheist surrender monkeys, and that John McCain also has a thing for bananas. QED, right?

But now that W has come out and said McCain's one of us conservatives, heck yeah, you might be asking yourself: What exactly is a conservative? And do I want to be one?

If you look at the records of Reagan and W. Bush (who, it should be pointed out, was the original second coming of Reagan), Republican conservatism consists of war against {Communism | terrorism}, tax cuts, limitless defense spending, and a strong record of lip service to all things morally conservative. (Also space shuttle explosions, spending time on the ranch, and the pulling down of walls and/or statues in foreign countries [Whoops! My bad. Berlin '89 was during BushOne. But Reagan called for it to be torn down.]. Certain persons with nationwide radio shows in the early afternoon are circulating the idea that Republicans also are really the party of small government. Wouldn't that be nice?)

I don't see anything in those legacies that McCain is opposed to. Has anyone else got a definition of conservatism that excludes McCain, but is still capable of containing the Republican party? Or are conservative Republicans gone the way of the dodo?