tongodeon's Election Screed

[tongodeon]

ronebofh I think the Democrats lost the election way back in 2002, when they were rolling over for the president in both the House and the Senate. How could they run against him in 2004 after doing exactly what he wanted them to do?

wilwheaton I'm stunned, and at a total loss for words this morning ... Apparently, my country holds a fundamentally different set of

Comments

[tongodeon]

The resume had a lot of post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, which I don't consider a deal-killer for political communication (it's not a white paper). There were a lot of things that were included as if they were damning without a lot of explanation as to why they were damning

I admit that "almost every major economic indicator deteriorated during Bush's term" is fallacious "correlation not causality", but you're throwing a very large baby out along with a very small amount of bathwater. There are 26 major bullet points in the Bush Resume (not counting sub-points). By my reckoning only two of them are post hoc ergo proctor hoc fallacies: "30% dollar collapse" and "every major economic indicator". I'll allow that you're free to reject 7% of the resume for this reason, but you still have 93% to contend with.

The main foreign policy attack -- 'the war has been run poorly' -- isn't a good enough attack, even though it's true, when the opposition seems reluctant to admit there's a war on at all. I'd rather have my war run poorly than ignored.

Your point that the war is a disaster and will be a disaster for either candidate is well-made. Four of the 26 points (14%) are "Bush's war going badly" points. ("temporarily disrupted the Taliban", "war against Al Qaeda a miserable failure", "8,169 out of 100,000 Iraqi soldiers trained") I'm not counting war-related points like "war based on Chalabi's already-discredited lies" or "congradulating the SecDef after he admitted to ordering the violations of the Geneva Conventions" because I don't believe those were decisions that Kerry would have made, and therefore they illustrate a substantive difference between the candidates.

So you've counted six out of 26 points on the resume as "valid and cause for concern but not sufficiently damning of Bush personally". What about the remaining 77% of the resume? Percieving 23% accurate-but-inapplicable information as somehow invalidating the entire paper is disconfirmation bias, an aspect of the irrational cognitive dissonance I mentioned.

minor retraction

[tongodeon]

Upon further reflection in the shower, "disconfirmation bias" doesn't strictly apply. Disconfirmation bias provides increased criticism to theories which contradict his beliefs (which is a common reaction to the resume) but that's a separate issue from what's going on when bias exaggerates the percentage of conflicting data the subject thinks he's discounted.