The New Republic

Except we're specifically dealing with Krauthammer, so malice is the safer assumption. Props to Lowry, though, for reminding his fellow conservatives of how a bill becomes law. It never pays to assume that a conservative has actually read the Constitution, nor seen the relevant episodes of Schoolhouse Rock. A further note of clarification: Once the House passes the Senate bill, it won't even need the president's signature. Absent a veto, any bill passed by both houses of Congress becomes law after 10 days whether the president signs it or not.

- rhubarbs

March 4, 2010 at 2:42pm

In fairness to Krauthammer, they never showed Schoolhouse Rock in Canada.

- wildboy

March 4, 2010 at 3:00pm

The conservatives full well understand what reconciliation is for. That's why they're aiming most of their rhetoric at House Dems, stressing that they're going to have to vote for the Senate bill, with all of its Florida and Nebraska and Louisiana ugliness), be prepared to defend THAT vote, and then HOPE that the Senate can pass the very very very tough reconciliation bill. They know damn well that if the House votes for the Senate bill, its game over. In fact, if I were the Dems and do manage to pass the Senate bill in the House, I'd have a big signing ceremony on that, establish that health care is now the law of the frickin land, wait a week or so, and THEN launch the FIX bill as a new effort. I'd even try to get Republicans to join he effort. Do they really want to vote AGAINST a bill that removes the more corrupt parts of the Senate bill? To filibuster against it. If they do, you have a campaign issue against them and you just pass it through reconciliation. If they join you on it, THEN you can make the case that health care was a bipartisan effort after all. Give 'em a little credit and let 'em share whatever heat there is. I realize this approach would greatly strain the already shaky trust between the House and Senate, but I think if they could pull it off, they could score some empty PR points on it. And, given all of the cheap PR points scored AGAINST them so far, they could use a win in that regard.

- rambooride

March 4, 2010 at 3:05pm

Brilliant, Rhubarbs. The sad thing about Khammer is that he has a very large intellect, made impossibly small by his bottomless malice.

- Geoff G

March 4, 2010 at 3:48pm

"when confronted with strange behavior, never assume malice when ignorance is available as an explanation." This is wrong on at least two levels. First, if strang behaviour in the past has arisen out of malice, then it is appropriate to presume malice in new strange behaviour, unless proven otherwise. Second, and more to the point, palpable and wilful ignorance coupled with hollering abuse and lies at the top of your voice, while not malice *simpliciter*, is nonetheless malice moral and sociologgical. As the recent note on Rove demonstrated, and as we know from endless reruns of the same deer-in-the-headlights look in the eyes of Republicans facing questions on policy, or their brazen lies, what we have here is not just ignorance, but deep malice masquerading (in its literal sense) as ignorance.

- icarusr

March 4, 2010 at 4:51pm

icarusr, my definition of "evil" centers on the instrumental treatment of others. To act as though other people are objects to be used to achieve one's own ends is to do evil as I see it. This is a more unforgiving definition of "evil" than most would prefer, since it judges actions rather than the character of the actor, and as such it will apply to every person from time to time. None of us are evil, but all of us sometimes do evil. Anyway, your thoughts on the malice of chosen or feigned ignorance give me pause to wonder, ought I extend my definition of "evil" to include the instrumental treatment of truth as well as persons? I begin to think so.

- rhubarbs

March 4, 2010 at 5:21pm

Rhubs: more often than not, the instrumental treatment of truth is far more devastating than that of people. This is so, in my view, because each of us, at any given point, has a rather limited ambit of actual evil - you can hurt the people around you or blow up a hundred or so, or in the rare case, a few thousand, but that is about that. To abuse the truth - either through actual lies or wilful ignorance - such as to lead to policies that harm not just thousands but millions, now that is evil refined and distilled. For example, William Saffire might well have been a gentle man in his personal life, but his propagation of the pernicious lie about Saddam and al-Qaeda, and his repeating the crap about yellow-cake when he should have known better, helped perpetrate a fraud on the American people and led to untold miseries. There is your malice moral and political. And much the same can be said about "death panels" and "socialism" - not by tea-party ignoramuses, but by those who ought to know better but who refuse to do so.

- icarusr

March 4, 2010 at 5:46pm

icarusr, the closing paragraphs of Mitchell's Cloud Atlas come to mind: "History admits no rules; only outcomes. What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts. What precipitates acts? Belief." My problem with extending my understanding of evil is that advocacy of any ideology as such would become an evil act. And while I'm happy to admit that most actions motivated by ideology are by their nature evil as I define it, I'm loath to define the mere expression or advocacy of ideology as evil. All ideology regards the truth instrumentally, and yet some ideology offers useful insights. If any ideology became the sole basis of state action, as all ideologies aspire to, it would be the ruin of republican government, human decency, and personal liberty within the afflicted society. Yet when ideology is kept sufficiently far from direct action upon the levers of power, ideology can play a productive role in the creation and dissemination of new ways of solving the commonwealth's problems. Then again, it is true that a word spoken in contempt of the truth can create beliefs that lead to actions such that the evil done is far worse than any direct action the speaker could conceivably do. One man who takes a machete to his neighbors is a murderer; one man who takes to the radio to persuade thousands to take machetes to their neighbors is a genocidaire. But the question is whether it is the genocidaire's instrumental attitude toward the truth that is the locus of evil in his action, or whether it is his instrumental attitude toward both the victims of the genocide he perpetrates and the followers he persuades to commit his crimes. I suspect the latter is sufficient to distinguish evil from not-evil in most cases. And I can conceive of circumstances in which an instrumental regard of truth can be appropriate to a fully non-instrumental regard for other persons. So I'm still on the fence.

- rhubarbs

March 4, 2010 at 7:54pm

Didn't anybody read Harry Frankfurt? Never underestimate the prevalence of bs.

- cspencef

March 4, 2010 at 8:20pm

I loved "Cloud Atlas". I agree with your last point that the problem with genocidaires is the genocide - their contempt for life - rather than their instrumental use of the truth, as such. I guess, at some level, if you are given to contempt of life or of your fellow citizens, then contempt for the truth is more or less part of the game. And, to put it differently, extreme contempt for the truth would not arise if one were not contemptuous of others. And yet. I am, as you know, a child of revolution, one that, for most people who poured into the streets, was meant to do good. Not only for the masses, but also many of the leaders, and these were not all bloodthirty mullahs. Among the leaders were many intellectuals and human rights activists - and most of these, at the time, also "meant well". Even the best of them lied and distorted, for a higher ideal. And there we are, 31 years later, a million dead, thouands executed ... I have a deep mistrust of ideology, of intellectuals (in Paul Johnson's definition), of manipulation of the truth, far more than I do of the simple killing instinct. It is they who make evil palatable.

- icarusr

March 5, 2010 at 1:31am

I understand you, icarusr, and indeed the family of a good friend and colleague has lately been harassed by the Iranian authorities. His father was jailed by the shah as a young man, and now is jailed by the ayatollah as an old man. But, and I'm not drawing or asserting a conclusion here, just exploring the arguments a bit, isn't the instrumental regard for persons at the root of the abuse of truth you rightly call out? The totalitarian wishes to remake society to please himself; remaking human society necessarily requires remaking the great mass of individual human souls who populate that society. The new regime requires new men. And thus by definition the totalitarian's fundamental purpose is the manipulation of people - all of them! - as tools to achieve a selfish end. The abuse of truth follows from the primary impulse to manipulate people instrumentally, does it not? If so, the locus of evil in the ideological revolutionary's actions remains in his regard of others as means rather than as ends unto themselves. And is this not true of all ideologues, even those that fall short of the totalitarian impulse? The ideologue is at heart an idolator; he is someone who pours ultimate concern into a finite vessel. This is a mistake; it is foolishness. But must it be evil? One cannot value truth and hold an ideology, but isn't any pernicious abuse of truth by the ideologue ultimately rooted in his desire to manipulate others for his own ends? On the other hand, the only meaningful line I can find to draw between ideologies that do evil and those that do not relates to access to power, and thus in a democratic republic to the number of adherents. And the number of people in the room should have no bearing on the fundamental question of whether instrumental regard for truth is necessarily evil; a case must be found or imagined in which the instrumental abuse of truth by a governing ideologue would not be an evil act in order for my objection to stand. At present I do not know of such an example, nor can I imagine a sufficient hypothetical circumstance, and so I admit that while I am not yet actually persuaded, you are probably right.

- rhubarbs

March 5, 2010 at 10:49am

"The abuse of truth follows from the primary impulse to manipulate people instrumentally, does it not?" Depends, I guess, on your definition of "manipulate people instrumentally". For example, I think that the liberals, intellectuals, human rights activits, and soft lefties who fell behind Khomeini and who, in one way or another, either supported or enabled the initial Reign of Terror (leading to wave after wave of executions and purges in the coming years) did *not* have selfish or totalitarian impulses. Nor do I think that they thought of the victims instrumentally: Foucault and Sartre might have justified killing thousands to purge imperalism of its hand-maidens, but most French-trained Iranian intellectuals did not go that far; they simply did not protest when others used people instrumentally; they did not do so because their approach to the truth was instrumental. At any rate, I think either one of our approaches brings us to the same place. The evil that you do in propagating lies - whatever the impulse behind it - could well exceed the evil that you do physically eliminating people. The lies corrupt and rot the republic in a way that simple murder does not. Gonzales, for me, was a far greater danger than the average CIA operative who might have dunked a few heads in a bucket of ice or cracked a few teeth. The Republican Party, as it is, is not just playing politics; they are breeding cynicism in the State. The corrosion that that causes in the foundations of civil society is far more pernicious, in my view, than the attack on the two towers ever was.

- icarusr

March 5, 2010 at 5:22pm