Okay, so What do we Call a Rebuttal of a Pre-buttal?

Given some recent comments and maneuvers made by his campaign, I’m finding that lately I like Mitt Romney less with every passing day. The latest example of impetus for my diminished opinion of him: the State of the Union Pre-buttal.

First of all, the very notion of a pre-buttal constitutes a sad statement about the status of our national discourse. Has it really come to be too much to ask for the participants in a debate to try to let one another speak before they attempt to refute the statements that each is likely to make? What kind of example are you setting for your audience if you indicate that they don’t even have to listen to the other side of the argument in order to know that it’s wrong? I get it: You disagree with whatever he says whenever he says it. But that provides you with plenty of material to comment on from the recent past, without having to ask your audience to gather round the crystal ball while you go into detail about what’s wrong with the statements that are yet to come.

There’s no such thing as a pre-buttal. It’s a goddamn oxymoron. You either make the first volley in a debate or you rebuff the initial comments in a response. You can’t preemptively undercut the lead participant’s position and then stand back and gloat over his failure to address your objections in the remarks that he prepared well ahead of time. Your confidence is admirable, Mitt, but it’s belied by your refusal to let the audience have another opinion in memory, to which they can compare your grandstanding.

Now to be fair, Mitt Romney didn’t invent the pre-buttal. It seems like it’s becoming common practice now during the Obama administration, but John Edwards made the same dick move before George W. Bush’s 2008 address. But neither the fact that it has been done on both sides of the aisle nor the fact that he’s just going along with the devolution of political etiquette is an excuse. Anyone who thinks that a debate doesn’t have to have structure is a dim-witted political opportunist more interested in manipulating a crowd than making a valid argument, and he’s worsening the state of American politics.

But just giving a speech a stupid name doesn’t make it that objectionable, right? You’ve got to look at the content; it could be a perfectly normal campaign speech that just happens to coincide with the State of the Union address.

Well, first of all, it truly lives up to the stupid name:

“It's shameful for a President to use the State of the Union to divide our nation.”

He hasn’t said anything yet, jackass!

Mitt refers directly to the State of the Union further into the text of the speech, as well, and couples the manipulative anachronism with vibrant red herrings:

“If tonight were the first message to Congress in a Romney administration, I'd have the courage to tell the American people how it is and tell Congress what we really need to do. I wouldn't spend my time blaming others for how we got in this mess; I'd explain how we're going to get out of it. I'd use the State of the Union to lay out an agenda that will get our country back on track and get our fiscal house in order.”

Well that’s great, Mitt, but it’s really not of issue right now, is it? If you were giving your first State of the Union address, it would be either a fictitious two years ago, or a potential two years from now. And guess what? Whatever President Obama says tonight – which, again, we haven’t heard yet – it’s going to be markedly different from the remarks he made during his first year in office, or that he will make during the first year of his second term.

If you want to create an elaborate false reality in which you’re president, Mitt, fine. But you can’t choose which year of your presidency it is, so let’s assume either that it’s the present and you’ve been in charge since 2009, or that it’s 2015 and you’re three quarters of the way through the term you’re seeking now. If by some chance – and I know this is a tremendous stretch of the imagination – you haven’t managed in that time to reduce unemployment to record lows while eliminating the debt and growing the army into something that “no one would think of challenging,” what would your speech be like then? Would you charge forward and explain how we’re going to get out of it this time, and never pause to explain the context for why a Romney administration doesn’t preside over utopia? Would you still expect no one to call you on your bullshit?

Even if I were going to vote for you Mitt, I wouldn’t expect you to come remotely close to fulfilling your insanely delusional promises. I didn’t expect it of Obama, and I wouldn’t expect it of anyone. Promises do not constitute “the courage to tell the American people how it is.” Honest, thorough explanations do.

But the piece de resistance of irrational political discourse comes near the end, though one has to admire the balls on a man who is willing to essentially tell people with a straight face that he’s blowing smoke up their asses:

“Do we want a president who will try to explain again why his policies haven't worked? Do we want a president who will keep promising that this time he will get it right? Do we want a president who keeps telling us why he's right and why we're wrong? Or do we want the sense of excitement that comes with a new beginning?”

Seriously, Mitt? That’s your argument? That we’d be better off electing somebody different simply because he’s different, because that would be exciting and allow delusional Republicans to experience the ecstatic expectation of miracles that delusional Democrats enjoyed four years previous? You think your constituents should vote for you because you won’t have to explain why your policies haven’t worked? No kidding, they haven’t worked, you haven’t fucking done anything yet! You think they should vote for you because when you promise that you’ll get it right, you’re promising it for the first time? You think cocksure certitude about his own views somehow distinguishes Obama from you?

Jesus, Mitt, given how well-groomed you are, you must look in the mirror once in a while. Have you ever paid any attention to yourself? A few moments of introspection would probably prevent you from being increasingly insufferable. If amidst the tight schedule of your campaign you don’t have time for that, I’ll look forward to the next thing you say or do to make me despise you more.

Disingenuous Comment of the Week: Mitch Daniels

On Wednesday’s Daily Show, Jon Stewart conducted an excellent interview with Mitch Daniels, mostly focused on wealth disparity and economic policy. After talking at length about the value of consensus-building, the Indiana Governor almost immediately launched into a stream of divisive language, referring to “the president’s obsession with wealthy people,” and his “constant bashing” of them. Daniels then stated that “You could confiscate the wealth of all those people, and it wouldn’t do any good.”

When Jon Stewart pointed out that Daniels might thus be contradicting his own advice about “the language of unity,” Daniels looked introspective for a brief moment before coming up with a very unique and creative excuse. “If I got a little defensive,” he said, “it’s because you’re asking me to defend positions I haven’t taken.”

Sure, Mitch, I understand; I do that all the time! Like if somebody were to ask me to defend the death penalty, my first impulse would be to describe those who oppose it as weak-willed anarchists who want to see murders roaming our streets with impunity. Of course, I don’t believe that, but that’s just the kind of thing you say when you’re called upon to play devil’s advocate, right? Any time that somebody misidentifies my social or political views as being more extreme than they are, I make certain that appropriate their language and launch ad hominem attacks against the opposing viewpoint. I mean, that’s the only natural way to defend oneself, right?

It’s been a long time since I’ve heard a public statement that sounded quite so baldly disingenuous. The only thing more stunning than the fact that he attempted to defend his aggressive rhetoric by claiming that it was a consequence of his views actually being more moderate than they seemed was that in the context of the interview the strategy apparently worked. Rather than cutting it down, Jon Stewart adopted that point and took to defending himself against the baseless charge that he was arguing on the basis of straw men. He ended the interview by saying that he hoped the governor didn’t feel that he was asking him to defend positions that didn’t represent him.

If this sort of defense was acceptable when Daniels was caught in his own hypocrisy, can it be used by anyone, anytime their own behavior doesn’t match the expectations they set for their opponents? If I catch criticism for describing corporate CEOs as wealthy parasites profiting off the painful labors of people far below them, can I then demand more civility from them by saying that I only said what I did because somebody was asking me to defend that view? If a politician publicly uses racist language, can he keep his job by saying that he doesn’t really believe those things, but was backed into a corner by minority critics who mistakenly insisted that he did?

Whatever the spontaneous strategy a professional talker comes up with, any attempt to reverse a statement that you have just made in perfectly plain terms should be met with derisive laughter. Nobody should get away with such a thing, and it should be obvious that the gauge of a person’s real views and his actual respect for his opponents is what he says when he’s not prepared to censor his own remarks, when his pressured by being asked to defend a view that he may or may not hold. And if your job is to serve the public according to your personal views of what is right and wrong, it should be obvious that if someone challenges you to defend a view that you don’t hold, you simply don’t do that. You tell them exactly what you do believe, instead. It goes a long way towards avoiding perfectly absurd backpedaling and mind-bending rhetoric. I simply can’t imagine that someone could fail to understand that after more than six years as governor. But retaining a strong tendency for hypocrisy through that much time in office? That I understand.

Stick to the Character Limit

In advance of the current issue, The Atlantic Monthly has changed its Letters to the Editor section. Comments are now printed in a more broadly conceived section called "The Conversation," which, as James Bennet explains in the Editor's Note for May, "is an attempt to more fully express the widening range of reaction to our work." That is to say that there is a much greater diversity of media through which one might comment on a piece of journalism, and The Atlantic now prints traditional letters to the editor alongside blog comments, poll results from TheAtlantic.com, and so on.

By and large, I find this to be an admirable way of extending the dialogue that might grow out of the writing in the magazine without giving short shrift to anyone who tries to express their insight in what is arbitrarily identified as the wrong place. That said, I think there are wrong places - media that ought not be included, and I was appalled to see that among the meaningful and articulate commentary, one tweet had been transcribed and printed in the pages of an esteemed, historic magazine. It read: "I love the 'Letters to the Editor' part of The Atlantic where they let the writers respond. SO MUCH GLORIOUS CATTINESS."

Perhaps this is appreciably amusing, and perhaps it comments on the nature of the discourse that tended to fill the newly renamed section. But anything that's one hundred forty characters at an established maximum is severely limited in how amusing it can be, and debilitatingly limited in how insightful or poignant it can be. The main impression that I get from the above tweet is that it seems like it's just somebody's off-the-cuff, knee jerk commentary. It seems like something that somebody might have simply said aloud to a friend while reading the magazine, not a series of thoughts that somebody took the time to formulate and carefully express. The latter is the only thing that deserves to be put into print.

But of course, my reaction to the tweet printed in "The Conversation" is my reaction to every tweet I'm likely to run across. They all strike me as just being part of somebody's unfiltered and unrefined stream of consciousness, because of course that is what they all are. That is specifically what Twitter is an outlet for, and it has no more place in "The Conversation" than a word from somebody who is simply passing through the room has in an actual ongoing conversation.

The tweet printed in The Atlantic is a perfect example of that. The word "love" is used in it in such a way as to actually denote almost complete detachment. Neither is it used sarcastically nor does it indicate genuine affection, of the sort that would make one want to give something back to the object of it. It is "love" in a sense that is almost unique to the internet, and no doubt endemic on Twitter, in that it is expressed in pleasure at simply letting something happen while you stand as an anonymous observe to it, neither contributing to nor mitigating its persistence.

More than that, anything that uses the word "glorious" in such a casual, colloquial, and borderline meaningless way should not be taken seriously. Is "glorious" really the best word that could have been used here? Does the cattiness the tweeter refers to actually confer something triumphal, something magnificent? Or would it be better to simply call it something like "pleasant"? I won't pretend to never use words like "glorious" in such exaggerative, overly-emphatic contexts when speaking to friends, but I would never write like that. And that is just the problem. The Atlantic is a magazine. It is a piece of literature. It is not idle talk, and there should be a distinction between the two.

It depresses me every time I see things like twitter further validated in traditional media. Does no one else perceive the absurdity of hearing a news presenter say "You can tweet at us," or of seeing a 134 year-old magazine print a comment IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS? Does no one else think that this sort of thing robs us of self-respect as a society? It seems to me that it is all an effort at inclusiveness in building a dialogue, but that fact, as I see it, is that including the largest number of voices possible tends to reduce the number of actual ideas being shared. We shouldn't strive to make room for the words of people who haven't really thought things through.

But everywhere I look, we seem to go on reducing the level of discourse, and I am left to wonder: Will there ever be such a volume of pablum in the media that we reach a breaking point that changes and compartmentalizes the ways in which we communicate, or will this go on indefinitely, until the entire conversation is presented in one-sentence increments, with every third comment being LOL or WTF?