This is an article in the Washington Post by one of their regular columnists, Josh Rogin, about the appointment by Trump of Tulsi Gabbard to be his head US Intelligence. Liberals are in a panic and trying to block this. A few comments;
“You can’t believe foreign propaganda more than your intelligence agencies — and hope to run them.”
This is the standard error. The liberals assume that because person A. says B and because K says B, that A is copying K. This is a possibility. It is equally possible that A and K are saying B because B is ‘true’. But this possibility apparently simply doesn’t occur to them. I see this error all the time in the liberal media.
she [Tulsi Gabbard] has been called a lot of names. She has been accused of being a “Russian asset,” a “useful idiot” and even “Russia’s girlfriend.” Hillary Clinton once suggested Moscow was “grooming” Gabbard to run for president.
Most of the accusations are framed in the passive meaning the author does not have to say who said them. In reality this is just a reiteration of insults which liberals have flung at Gabbard. By repeating them Rogin hopes to establish them. But they remain simply insults by her liberal opponents. It doesn’t mean she is any of these things. (“Russia’s girlfriend is a nasty insult of the kind which if the right made it of liberals would create a liberal uproar).
But the name-calling and claims of a Moscow-driven plot to elevate her (for which there is little concrete evidence) obscure real concerns about her nomination.
The author is adroit. He admits he is simply “name-calling” in an attempt to head off the kind of criticism I have just made. But, still, he does it. He know that mud sticks even if you admit that it is just mud as you throw it.
It’s that her long-standing pattern of embracing and amplifying Russian propaganda speaks to her poor judgment and tenuous allegiance to the truth.
See the point about logic above. A fail in basic logic.
She expressed skepticism about the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that Assad used chemical weapons against his own people
This probably relates to the Douma chemical attack. It is worth following the link provided by Rogin in which Gabbard simply expressed scepticism and also argued that accusations were probably not the best way to achieve peace in Syria. I would have though that scepticism and a desire for diplomacy were admirable qualities in a director of Intelligence. We can add that there are real doubts about the Douma attack – it may at least have been exaggerated by Assads opponents. Indeed a OPCW official leaked a contrasting view which cast doubt on the official Western account. [1] Gabbard’s scepticism appears to qualify her for her appointment, not disqualify her as Rogin tries to suggest.
Gabbard’s thinking follows a pattern. Instead of condemning Russia’s brutal, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, she claimed that the United States and its allies were responsible for provoking Russia. Worse, she described Ukraine as a corrupt autocracy — on par with Russia — as if there were no meaningful difference between a flawed democracy struggling to remain independent and an expansionist dictatorship. And in 2022, she amplified debunked Russian propaganda about the existence of U.S.-funded biolabs in Ukraine, propaganda that was used by Russian President Vladimir Putin to justify his aggression.
Her thinking “follows a pattern”. That is she thinks outside of the prescribed liberal narratives. This causes Rogin discomfort. Modern liberals do indeed behave like cult members. Thinking outside of official cult stories really upsets them. On a leading NGO score of corruption Ukraine scores only marginally better than Russia. As for “a flawed democracy struggling to remain independent and an expansionist dictatorship” one can only laugh. “Flawed democracy” is like saying that a criminal psychopath in the dock for rape and murder is just “going through a phase”. The current regime in Kiev descends from a coup which over-threw an elected President. Even before the current war media organisations and political parties were banned. The regime is “far-right” and has did nothing to implement the kind of respect for minority rights which would be a condition for it joining the EU, in fact introducing legislation on minority languages which would have to be undone were it ever to join the EU. Rogin’s account is sheer phantasy. And this, before we even consider the basic claim about Russia’s “dictatorial expansionism” – the fake explanation for Russia’s military operations, which is designed to cover up how the West provoked this war with its plan to put Ukraine into NATO and its turning a blind eye to Ukraine not implementing the Minsk agreements.
This is the level of “journalism”. It simply does not stand up to empirical or logical analysis. It is fiction. This is the daily diet of phantasy consumed by liberals in the West.
[Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Logical_Fallacies_Fallacy_Icon.png]
Notes