Reid and Thomas

If there were one habit of the Left I would want to abolish by fiat (oh, if only I could), it would be the habit of abusing conservatives as stupid. They did it to Eisenhower, notwithstanding the fact that he had led 10 million men to victory in World War II. They did it to Reagan, notwithstanding the obvious intelligence exhibited in his speeches and writing over many years (now helpfully documented in the recent publications of his radio speeches, letters, etc.). They do it to W with even more viciousness. But the problem with the "argument" is not that it's wrong, but that it's useless as argument to begin with. It's simply a classic logical fallacy that freshmen comp teachers used to teach, the ad hominem fallacy, which consists of the statement that that my opponent's argument that X is true must be wrong because my opponent is a dullard, without every trying to prove or even attempt to prove that X itself is false through counterfactuals.

Anyway, Harry Reid, the Democratic Senator from Nevada and minority leader-in-waiting, recently gave us an egregious example of the ad hominem fallacy in his contemptuous remark that Justice Clarence Thomas' opinions are poorly written. The blogosphere immediately pounced, noting that Reid was unable to give any examples of poorly written opinions, and conjecturing that Reid was simply falling prey to the inside-the-Beltway virus that holds that conservatives must be stupid, or, worse still, that he was coupling this virus with a more vicious strain of closeted racism -- Clarence Thomas is stupid because he's a conservative, sure, but because he's also black, his particular stupidity must take the form of an inability to articulate ideas in prose. (Think: isn't the stereotypical nice thing that liberals say about African Americans they like that they are sooo very articulate? Witness Barack Obama at the DNC.)

Well, the mainstream media apparently took notice, and CNN asked Reid for an example of an opinion. Reid gave one, saying "that's easy," but then proceeded to mention an opinion from a case where Thomas supposedly wrote a dissent that paled in comparison to a dissent from Scalia. The problem was, Scalia hadn't written a dissent in the case! (As pointed out by Eugene Volokh, among others.)

This is a scandal. The putative leader of the Democrats in the Senate unfairly maligns a Supreme Court Justice in terms that smack of a racial putdown, then, when called on it, says something patently and demonstrably false. If he were a Republican, he'd be gone.

Questions: will the MSM follow up now? Will the MSM actually do some work and read some of Thomas' opinions and report the obvious conclusion that they are well-written, cogent legal arguments? Will anybody start calling for Reid to step down?

Bigger question: when will the 60-something pols who currently run the country realize that technology has changed the rules of the game for political rhetoric? Before the Internet and before search engines and before Lexi-Nexis and Google, maybe you could get away with an offhand reference to an opinion a political opponent had written, or make a statement that conflicts with something you've said before. No more. Nowadays, in the era of open source journalism that is the blogosphere, you're going to get caught in your lie. There's just too much access to information.

Ain't it grand?