An age old technique for someone inbetween decent blog posts is to simply surf the web until something either irks you or makes you cheer, both behaviors best done in public fora (forums?). So when I came across the breaking commentariat of Obama's torture memos, it doesn't take long for articles to cross my radar. One, in particular, for no other reason than it's sloppy reasoning and rhetorical emptiness. On face value, the claim that torture demands rigorous inquiry is more than fair. Both policy makers and interrogators themselves need to know if what they're doing is producing actionable intelligence or just inflicting inhumane pain on someone. Thus far, one's opinions on the issue seems to come straight down party lines, which doesn't dilute the truth value of the respective claims, but it does make it a little hard for wise or just policy making when the advocacy is so tainted.
So, my problem with this particular article isn't it's particular claims, or it's constructions. I agree Obama seems more inclined to pardon Nixon than put the country through a special prosecution, and I agree the above study ought to be done. But the article itself could easily be a case study in Argumentative Logic 101 for circular reasoning, implied conclusions or hidden claims. He isn't arguing that we need to be making wiser policy, and that to do so we need to know if torture works or not. He stipulates that torture doesn't work, so what we need is a study that says torture doesn't work so that Mitt Romney won't resurrect the practice. It's because of articles like this that make it so hard for reasonable public discourse to exist. It perpetuates the echo chamber.
Even when reasonable people agree with things like "Congress should appoint someone to discover if all those renditions and secret prisons produced anything useful and if those methods produced the advertised result", they're forced into the position of defending the broader claim that they're really out witch hunting for Republican blood. It changes the issue from an issue of public relevance into yet another issue of partisan hackery.
The irony of the Democratic majorities and Presidency is both their admirable willingness to buck a party line, and their hair-tearing inability to coalesece around the important issues of the day (for more explanation). The Republicans, for all their faults, are willing to embrace a party orthodoxy, create and reify the narrative to generate and sustain public support, and refuse to hew far from the bone (whether all that qualifies as responsible statesmanship, or representation is a whole 'nother issue). But Democrats are endearingly idiosyncratic. Which leaves them prone to getting hung up on issues of personal principle at the expense of public policy, and sufficiently divided that all the Republicans have to do to act like an opposition party is just sit back and snipe. The Republicans are in the midst of an existential crisis, yet the Democrats are so busy running around in circles the GOP isn't really in any hurry to create a counter-narrative.
So what that leaves us with is the progressive commitariat. They raise issues of policy, of justice, of fairness, of all the loud idiosyncracies that make policy makers so frustrating. But they do so from such hackneyed positions of partisanship their concerns can be written off as just that. The article isn't about the issue of torture, it's about the Democratic issue of getting back at Republicans. And when the article gets written with such obvious argumentative fallacies, it's counterproductive because it circumscribes the available rhetorical space, and associates further comments on the issue as more Democratic witch hunts.
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