Stupidity

What’s most amazing about the elements of the right who are fighting rhetorical battles on behalf of the president isn’t so much the mendacity, although that can be pretty awe-inspiring. It’s the unbelievably low assessment of the intelligence of their audience. The Weekly standard is the source of both my examples. First, via Matt Yglesias, we have a justification for the deportation of Yusef Islam even if he’s not been involved in any terrorist activity. Why, then? Because he’s a Wahhabist, and Wahhabism is bad, bad, bad. It’s also the state-sponsored religion of Saudi Arabia. No further comment should be necessary here.

Second: Yesterday afternoon on Paula Zaun, TWS writer Katharine Mangu-Ward was on to explain why it’s not really a big problem if significant portions of Iraq are not safe and secure enough to hold an election,* because you don’t need 100% turnout to hold an election, and it might even be bad if you have it. After all, the US has a turnout of 50% or so, and only the likes of Castro and Hussein have 100% turnouts.

*Political scientists as a group haven’t agreed on a single standard to use to gauge whether or not a particular political authority can accurately claim sovereignty over a particular area. I’ll take this opportunity to propose one handy rule we might use to figure this out: If the alleged sovereign entity doesn’t have enough access, control, and authority to even attempt to hold an election, they’re probably don’t deserve that title.

Update: sometimes titles speak for themselves. The following are articles found at the TWS front page in which the name of the article tells you all you need to know:

Iraq is not Vietnam, it’s Guadalcanal

Kerry’s other “F-Word”: Why the Democratic candidate doesn’t want to talk about how to deal with Falluja

in the interests of fairness, here’s a Kristol article that’s more or less correct. The part designed to make Bush look OK is misleading, of course.