Andy McCarthy has already come up with a list from this morning’s Senate testimony. Including a response to Holder’s attack on him.
30 thoughts on “Holder’s Whoppers”
Comments are closed.
Andy McCarthy has already come up with a list from this morning’s Senate testimony. Including a response to Holder’s attack on him.
Comments are closed.
Using McCarthy’s numbering system:
1) A terrorist attack can’t also be a tragedy?
2) Mamdouh Salim was sentenced to 32 years for the escape attempt, and now gets to be re-sentenced as the was ruled to be a terrorist act.
4) Holder’s statement is factually accurate, as McCarthy admits.
5) McCarthy holding a different opinion does not mean Holder’s opinion is a “whopper.”
6) A trial is also an exercise in justice.
7) Does anybody think Richard Reid, a man not smart enough to go into a bathroom and light his shoe bomb, has any useful information to sent to his Jihadi friends? Heck – let him talk to them – the distraction might be useful.
8) It is ironic that Holder managed to persuade a conservative, Roberts-led court of his opinions.
I guess one of out eight isn’t bad.
A terrorist attack can’t also be a tragedy?
To even ask that question is to display a profound ignorance of the meaning of the word “tragedy.”
A trial is also an exercise in justice.
Not when its outcome is foreordained.
To even ask that question is to display a profound ignorance of the meaning of the word “tragedy.”
And to dismiss the question is to display a profound ignorance of the fact that the English words “tragic” and “tragedy” have multiple meanings.
Dictionary.com defines the adjective “tragic” as:
1. characteristic or suggestive of tragedy: tragic solemnity.
2. extremely mournful, melancholy, or pathetic: a tragic plight.
3. dreadful, calamitous, disastrous, or fatal: a tragic event.
4. of, pertaining to, characterized by, or of the nature of tragedy: the tragic drama.
5. acting in or writing tragedy: a tragic actor; a tragic poet.
6. the tragic, the element or quality of tragedy in literature, art, drama, etc.: lives that had never known anything but the tragic.
Holder was using definition 4.
McCarthy writes: We do know what his position was eleven months ago when the Obama administration could have accepted his plea and pushed for his execution.
He thinks Obama was president 11 months ago?
Not when its outcome is foreordained.
No one is suggesting a trial with a foreordained outcome.
Correction, Holder was using definition 3: dreadful, calamitous, disastrous, or fatal.
How do you know which one he meant?
In any event, by so misusing the word, he is attempting to deflect attention from what it actually was, the two other “t” words — Islamic terrorism and treason. There was nothing tragic about it.
There were certainly aspects of 9/11 that qualify as “dreadful, calamitous, disastrous, or fatal,” but those are not the aspects relevant to a legitimate criminal prosecution. Holder’s insistence that 9/11 was a “tragedy” offer yet another piece of evidence that these people are not serious about conducting a legitimate criminal prosecution.
How do you know which one he meant?
That’s putting the burden in the wrong place. To qualify as a “howler” you or McCarthy would have to show that Holder could not have been using a reasonable definition, i.e. that he was not using definition 3.
In any event, by so misusing the word
If he mean definition 3 he was not misusing the word.
Rather, if he “meant” definition 3.
That’s putting the burden in the wrong place.
I’m putting the burden on the person making the claim — you.
If he mean definition 3 he was not misusing the word.
Yes, he was, as I explained. By using a word that wasn’t really appropriate instead of others that were much more so, he was providing a false context for his malfeasance in this decision. He was also promulgating the myth that what happened at Fort Hood had nothing to do with the war, and was just a tragic fall of a single flawed human. It is sophistry to declare either 911, or Fort Hood, a “tragedy.”
There were certainly aspects of 9/11 that qualify as “dreadful, calamitous, disastrous, or fatal,” but those are not the aspects relevant to a legitimate criminal prosecution. Holder’s insistence that 9/11 was a “tragedy” offer yet another piece of evidence that these people are not serious about conducting a legitimate criminal prosecution.
Holder’s “tragic” remark was referring to Ft. Hood, not 9/11.
I’m putting the burden on the person making the claim — you.
You and McCarthy are the ones claiming that Holder’s use of “tragic” constitutes a “whopper” — a lie. And you haven’t come close to showing that it is.
By using a word that wasn’t really appropriate
It was totally appropriate. You wouldn’t object if he’d called it a “dreadful shooting” instead of a “tragic shooting”, but “tragic” is commonly used to mean exactly the same thing as “dreadful”.
You and McCarthy are the ones claiming that Holder’s use of “tragic” constitutes a “whopper” — a lie.
Which is a separate subject than your claim to know what he meant by that word. The burden of proof remains on you.
It was totally appropriate.
Not as the only description.
You wouldn’t object if he’d called it a “dreadful shooting” instead of a “tragic shooting”,
Yes, I would, if that’s all that he’s called it. A child finding a loaded gun can accidentally cause a “dreadful shooting.” It would be like calling 911 “some awful airplane crashes.” It decontextualizes for political purposes what really happened.
but “tragic” is commonly used to mean exactly the same thing as “dreadful”.
Only by people careless with the language. I’d like to think that the Attorney General of the United States isn’t a person like that. But then, I’d also like to think that he wouldn’t be obfuscating, either. Unfortunately, he forces those people familiar with the actual meanings of words to make a choice between those two options.
My objection to the use of tragic as an adjetive for 9/11 or for Ft. Hood is based on the root word, tragedy.
To say that Ft. Hood was tragic is to say that it is our fault. So, unless you are lamenting that our soldiers are unarmed on the homefront, or that we didn’t kick the shooter out of the army along time ago, I don’t think the word is apt.
A tragedy is when your sainted aunt Mitilda gets up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, trips and falls down the stairs , breaks her neck and dies.
When people hijack our planes, kills several people on board them, and then flies said planes into our buildings it is not a tragedy it is an act of war.
The latter my be tragic but it it not a tragedy.
What is there to understand?
Jim says:
“No one is suggesting a trial with a foreordained outcome.”
Except, maybe, Obama himself. But go ahead, please keep trying to lawyer us with the definition of what “is” is. It worked so well for Bill Clinton….
Not as the only description.
Holder was on Capitol Hill to talk about 9/11 trials, not Ft. Hood, which is not under his jurisdiction. His comment was not presented as the only or definitive administration statement on the meaning of the Ft. Hood shootings.
Only by people careless with the language. I’d like to think that the Attorney General of the United States isn’t a person like that.
Please tell us about this mythical AG who never used a word with multiple meanings when a more precise word was available.
Talk about making a mountain out of a molehill.
To say that Ft. Hood was tragic is to say that it is our fault.
Or it is to say that “tragic” has more than one meaning. Sane Americans have no trouble understanding that he meant “dreadful” rather than “deserved.” The only people who are confused are the ones who want him to have meant something else, so they can be upset about it.
Holder was on Capitol Hill to talk about 9/11 trials, not Ft. Hood, which is not under his jurisdiction.
Neither was KSM, until Osama brought him into the act and gave him supremacy over the Pentagon, then hid behind his skirts and pretended it wasn’t his decision.
Please tell us about this mythical AG who never used a word with multiple meanings when a more precise word was available.
The issue is not precision, but accuracy, but you, like most of this administration, which issues nonsensical claims of jobs “saved or created” in non-existent congressional districts to two decimal points, probably don’t understand the difference.
Sane Americans have no trouble understanding that he meant “dreadful” rather than “deserved.”
I see you’re attempting to read his mind again. And no one claimed that he meant “deserved.” Just more straw men from you. No, sane (and intelligent) Americans recognize his sophistry. Sheeple go along with yours. You’ll have to look to some other web site for people who don’t see through it.
The only people who are confused are the ones who want him to have meant something else, so they can be upset about it.
We aren’t confused at all, despite his and your hope that we will be.
Rand:
I am just an engineer like you, and I don’t properly know if I can parse the meaning of “tragedy.” I don’t know if you have this kind of experience under your belt, but in addition to being an engineer, I am an engineering teacher training other engineers.
A student comes to me during office hours with a concern about a point deduction for his answer on a homework, which indeed was at variance with the solution I had posted. My solution, however, was at variance with what the problem precisely asked for in the book. Specifically, in one of those electrical R-L-C transient circuit problems, the book asked for di/dt at the instant just before you throw the switch, and I answered the question for di/dt at the instant just after you throw the switch. Our book uses this t=0-, t=0+ notation for that. The value of di/dt just before you throw the switch is particularly uninteresting, it is zero because everything is constant and all derivatives are zero, all of the examples in the book figure out di/dt for just after you throw the switch, all of my lecture examples were the same, I noted in lecture that after you throw the switch is when you want to know di/dt anyway to figure out the oscillation of current and voltage in the circuit, and I guess I just read past the misprint in the book as meaning what would make sense. It is often hard to proofread when you are relying heavily on context and read a wrong thing in the right way that makes more sense, and maybe engineers are bad proofreaders
I told the student something to the effect that I would correct his score and make the proper change in the gradebook, but suggested that “most people probably assumed what I did based on the text and lecture examples and didn’t even see the problem that other way giving the simpler solution.” The student retorted that his “study partner” interpreted it the same way, which started to “set me off” that this fellow wasn’t doing independent work but for all I knew was letting his bud do his homework for him.
I work in a “teaching evaluation” environment, and I imagine what I said next probably will result in comments on my evals and a notch taken out of my pay raise, if I even get one, for next year. But I told him something to the effect, “I am giving you the points, do you want to stand here and continue to argue with me about the correct or incorrect way to interpret the problem?”
I guess I should take heart that the students take “the specs” seriously and work off the literal meaning of the problem. It is probably a grave presumption on my part that the students should somehow read my mind or the mind of the textbook writer instead of answering the question as written. That students are doing this means also that they are not getting their HW out of frat house “solution and exam files” as I had assigned that problem the preceding semester, and I don’t think this issue had come up, or if it did, the students asked for clarification, especially in light of all of the examples in the book and examples and explanations in lecture of why di/dt after you throw the switch is important.
But I am seeing a lot of engineering students with “great legal minds”, who hang on the nuances of wording and notation instead of getting “the big picture” of the kind of engineering problem at hand. It is kind like an engineering firm getting a spec for the length of a long bridge in kilometers, only the documents states “meters.” One way would be to go ahead and design the bridge for the kilometer length because that is the scale of the chasm where the bridge is supposed to go. A second way, perhaps a better way, would be to go back to the customer and demand that the meters/kilometers question be resolved in a revised document. A third way is to read “meters” and deliver a “fine” meter-long bridge because that is what the customer wrote that they wanted and it says so in the document, and then give the customer (the professor is the customer of the work product in this instance) an “ear full” when there are consequences for building a bridge that only spans .1 percent of the chasm.
We can argue all day about what the proper definition and contextual application of “tragedy” should be, but Rand, I am beginning to thing you are the “engineering educator” in these parts who is having difficulty getting through to some “students.”
Generally, throughout human history, there has been a distinction given to disasters brought about through natural forces beyond human control and disasters brought about by actions of a person, a tribe, or a nation of persons who willfully intend you harm. Our notions of justice have grown up around the idea that the first kind of circumstance you just bear, and the second kind of circumstance is one for which one seeks some manner of retribution or justice or punishment or what have you.
Maybe in our modern, enlightened way of thinking, some tribe of people living in Baluchistan (one theory of 9-11 is that it has less to do with Bin Laden and more to do with KSM and some fellow Baluchi’s seeking independence from Iran by dragging America into their battle, but Bin Laden decided to brag and claim credit), what this tribe of backward Baluchis do is just an act of nature because of some theory of determinism and that they can’t help themselves. Or if there is human culpability, it is not with the Baluchis, Third Worlders who do what people in their circumstances of deprivation and injustice do, but the blame rests on Western shoulders. Or maybe KSM and friends are bad people, but retribution is so outmoded, and that as disproportionately powerful and wealthy as we are, it is our moral duty to just bear it. But if a person wants to spend electrons on this page saying that, they should “man up” and say that rather than engaging in petty arguments about the meaning of the word “tragedy.”
OK, Paul, you obviously put a lot of thought into this post, but I can’t quite figure out who is the student and who is the teacher in this analogy…
But I am inferring that “Jim” (and Chris) are the legalistic students. Please let me know if I’m mistaken.
The issue is not precision, but accuracy
No, the issue is precision. The shootings were dreadful. Holder used a word that has, as one of its meanings, dreadful. It’s an accurate label for the event. The only legitimate objection to him using “tragic” is that it is imprecise; it could mean things other than “dreadful.” But that’s a thin, legalistic objection, not evidence of a “whopper”.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the political spectrum, we have Sarah Palin who says that “death panel” was, like “evil empire,” not to be taken “literally.” Care to apply your evident concern for linguistic precision to Ms. Palin’s utterances?
non-existent congressional districts
You’re going to make an argument about typos? Really shooting for big game today!
And no one claimed that he meant “deserved.”
Scroll up to Dan Bennett writing To say that Ft. Hood was tragic is to say that it is our fault.
I wrote: “No one is suggesting a trial with a foreordained outcome.”
Josh Reiter replied: Except, maybe, Obama himself.
Obama did not say the verdict was foreordained, in fact he specifically said it was in the hands of the judge and jury. He made a prediction of the outcome, which prosecutors routinely do. He could predict that the White Sox will win the pennant next year; it wouldn’t foreordain that outcome either.
So yes, Obama and Holder are confident that the jury will find KSM guilty, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be a fair trial.
The only legitimate objection to him using “tragic” is that it is imprecise
No, I already provided the legitimate objection, which you ignored — that by itself, it is misleading in the extreme (and yes, inaccurate). But please, keep defending the partisan hack, and making yourself look like a worse one.
No, I already provided the legitimate objection, which you ignored — that by itself, it is misleading in the extreme (and yes, inaccurate).
Let me try to make this simple:
1. The shootings were “dreadful, calamitous, disastrous, or fatal”
2. Since “tragic” can mean “dreadful, calamitous, disastrous, or fatal”, the shootings were tragic.
Perhaps your argument is that Holder, by only using the adjective “tragic”, was implying that the shootings were not some other things (e.g. terroristic). But that inference is all in your head — not saying “A” is not the same as saying “not A”. Choosing to say “B” instead of “A” does not necessarily mean that the speaker considers “B” more important, or more true, than “A”. It isn’t as if someone had just asked him: “If you had to choose one adjective to describe the most salient characteristic of the Ft. Hood shootings, what would it be?”
The shootings were tragic; saying that they were is not remotely misleading or inaccurate.
Jim, as I said, we see through your and Holder’s sophistry. So does the public, judging by the polls.
I haven’t been able to find a transcript of Holder’s comments about the Fort Hood shootings. The thing I see about using words with multiple meanings is that it allows you to agree with a larger audience without committing yourself to a course of action. Everyone picks the meaning they want the most. Here, I don’t have enough information to determine whether Holder made a pleasant sounding, but disposable comment on Ft. Hood or he elaborated on that comment in a way that made the third meaning of the term, “tragic” clearer.
My view is that the real problem is that some people want to see clear and definite action, but the Obama administration does not want to commit itself to a course of action based solely on a single relatively small attack.
My view is that the real problem is that some people want to see clear and definite action, but the Obama administration does not want to commit itself to a course of action based solely on a single relatively small attack.
What “clear and definite” action do they want to see?
So does the public, judging by the polls.
What polls are these?
What polls are these?
I’m not going to do your homework for you. I’ll just let you sweat it out, as you’ll have to with the nationalization of healthcare.
Jim, you are ignoring connotation, which is a substantial part of what words mean. That’s why parsing natural language can’t be done by a computer that can read Merriam-Webster.
The difficulty is that one major connotation that attaches to tragedy is that it isn’t anyone in particular’s fault. When someone falls down the stairs and breaks his neck, we call it a tragedy because it’s “calamitous and dreadful” but also not anyone’s fault. If the same person were pushed down the stairs, we wouldn’t call it a tragedy, we’d call it a crime.
That’s the problem with the AG’s statements. The connotations attached to this speech studiously avoid assigning blame. This stuff just happens! Life is full of tragedy, you know. Last Sunday I had a picnic planned and then it went and rained! Eleven soldiers went to get their papers and a deadly bullet storm broke out! Who knows why? We live in a vale o’ tears, alas.
People strongly object to that kind of hand-wringing fatalism, as they demonstrated rather forcefully in 1980, when the last occupant of the White House to think in those terms was ejected. If something is a crime, because we can quite easily pin the blame on someone with wicked intentions and effects, then we’d like to see that distinction made, in deeds and in words.
Besides, quoting the dictionary on the meaning of words is so 1980s Usenet flame war. Surely you can do better.
the Obama administration does not want to commit itself to a course of action
based solely on a single relatively small attack.Fixed that for ya, Karl.