9/04/2004 06:10:00 PM|||Joe|||Hmmm.

I was writing a response to a column by Ann Coulter. If you don't know who she is, consider yourself lucky. But not for much longer, because I'm going to tell you who she is.

I haven't read any of her books. But I've read some of her columns and I've seen her on TV. As far as I can tell, she is either a certified blithering idiot, or she is evil. Possibly both. Check out some of her raving lunacies at her incredibly well-designed site.

It doesn't take much fact-checking to show her to be dumb or a liar. It's hard to tell. But she's a well-known pundit for some reason, so I lean toward considering her to be manipulative and evil.

Anyway, I wanted to set up a deal with a friend of mine where we analyze, refute, debunk, etc. various op-ed columns. Doesn't matter what political persuasion the articles tend towards. We'd just go all out. Like a philosophy class, only more fun.

I took a test run on one of Coulter's articles. Why? Well, because it is easy. I could have dug through public records to prove her false. But that would require work. Instead, I did something even easier — I refuted her on purely logical grounds.

Now that was fun. She demonstrated a misunderstanding of what "begging the question" means. I went from there and hacked it up.

I'm considering putting up a web site to put these articles up on. But I haven't finished this test-run. So I went to look at the article today. And what do you know? She's changed it. No mention of question-begging.

I don't know if I'm pleased or disappointed. Maybe both. I'm sure someone politely pointed her logical nonsense out to her, and she revised.

Anyway, here's the current article: Admitted War Criminal Cries Foul.

As for the original that contains the faux pas — I got it from google's cache and PDF'd it here.

My refutation wasn't finished. I don't see much reason to finish it now, since she dropped a huge part of her column. Here is part of it, though:

Does anyone take Ann Coulter seriously?

Really. Aren’t the right a little embarrassed by her?

Where to start. Wow.
“Matthews employs a logical calculus known as ‘begging the question,’ which goes something like this:”
How cute. Actually, begging the question is not “logical calculus”, whatever that is. It's a logical fallacy.

That aside, I don't see how:
  1. John Kerry claims to be a great war hero.
  2. Maybe so, but legitimate questions have been raised about his combat record.
  3. How can you say that about a great war hero like John Kerry?
begs the question. Smarter people than I may correct me. To beg the question means you assume a conclusion in the premise(s). Here’s an example:
  1. God spoke to Moses.
  2. Therefore, God exists.
This is fallacious because the premise (1) already assumes that God exists.

Coulter is being very sloppy. Probably purposely. Throwing aside the principal of charity for the moment, let's examine this at face-value.

What is being assumed? The first premise is simple: “John Kerry claims to be a great war hero.” I'm guessing that that is the assumed conclusion, and not “questions have been raised”. If that's the case, then the argument is simplified to:
  1. John Kerry claims to be a great war hero.
  2. Maybe so, but legitimate questions have been raised about his combat record.
  3. Therefore, John Kerry claims to be a great war hero.
But that doesn’t make much sense. What is being assumed by “John Kerry claims to be a great war hero?” John Kerry's existence is certainly assumed. That is all that is presumed which is not already present. I'm trying to charitably reconstruct her argument, but I'm having a hard time. What is she claiming? Her claim appears to be that Matthews' assumed conclusion is that questions about Kerry's service are patently false because Kerry is a war hero.

This is not fairly framing the argument. It is more accurately:
  1. John Kerry makes certain claims about his service.
  2. People who served closely with him corroborate his story.
  3. Military records corroborate his story.
  4. A bunch of people who served in similar capacities as John Kerry, and in similar geographical areas, dispute his story.
  5. They have no evidence besides hearsay to corroborate their account of events.
  6. Official accounts trump hearsay.
  7. The SBVs' accounts are ostensibly hearsay.
  8. Therefore, there is no reason to assume that the “Swift Boat Veterans” are speaking the truth.
Furthermore, since Kerry's account agrees with the official record, it is reasonable to assume that his claims are true.

So Coulter might claim that the official records are false. But this leads to a logical black hole — if we question the official records, on what basis can we argue that Kerry, O'Neill or anyone else were even in Vietnam? We only have these records to go on.

Let’s not even bring up how stories by the SBVs keep changing.

The truth is that the SBVs are angry about things Kerry said (not what he did) 30+ years ago. That’s it. Kerry was entitled to his view on the war, and historical retrospect has not entirely disagreed with him.

Of course, I’ve diverged from the point of Coulter’s article, which was to further confuse the issue.

She’s basically mad at Bill O’Reilly and Chris Matthews for not embracing the SBVs.

But… dammit… I’m gonna look at it line-by-line.

“There are several methods of evaluating the claims of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, 254 of whom have signed a letter saying John Kerry is not fit to be commander in chief.”

Several ways? Sure:I’ll put aside the implicit suggestion of that statement.

“There is the Bill O'Reilly method, which is to abandon independent thinking and simply come out in the middle, irrespective of where the two sides are. In response to Newt Gingrich's remark that the Swift Boat Veterans' independent ads were ‘the conservative movement's answer to Michael Moore,’ O'Reilly said, ‘I don't want either of them.’”

Wow. It’s amazing to watch one crazy person attack another nut.

How is O'Reilly abandoning independent thinking? He says, “I don't want either of them.” Ok. He doesn't want Moore or the Swift Vets. How is that abandoning independent thinking and coming out in the middle?

What does it mean to say that the SBVs are “the conservative movement’s answer to Michael Moore”? Conservatives probably believe that Moore is wrong and spewing falsehood. Ok. So what’s the answer? Truth? Presumably not, since there's no documentation to back them up. So maybe the SBVs are the conservative version of Moore. So, by conservatives' beliefs, they are incorrect, since Moore is.

So why should we pay attention?

Like I said, this wasn't finished. But I would have liked to expand on some points. No point now. Not in this context, anyway.|||109434775054344262|||Coulter