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Politics & Media
Apr 02, 2015, 05:40AM

Scott Walker, Liar or Warmonger?

Better the first than the second.

Rsz o governor scott walker facebook.jpg?ixlib=rails 2.1

Everybody loves to sneer at hypocrisy. That's because hypocrisy is easy to pin down. If you say one thing and do another—well, there you are, dead to rights, saying one thing and doing another. Other moral judgments are a lot trickier. If you're the president, for example, and you call down a drone strike on a bunch of kids, is that immoral? You can say you didn't mean it; you can say you were hunting terrorists; you can say that sometimes you need to make tough choices to defend whatever it is you think you're defending by killing children. But if you said you'd call down a drone strike, and then you don't make a drone strike, it's cut and dried—you're a hypocrite. You promised and you didn't deliver.

Conor Friedersdorf has a fun post at the Atlantic this week in which he makes a strong case that Scott Walker's foreign policy is filled with rank hypocrisy. Walker told Hugh Hewitt that he wanted to "eradicate" ISIS and al-Qaeda, and that he’d do whatever it takes to rid the earth of those menaces. But as Friedersdorf says, this is boilerplate nonsense. "Would doing ‘whatever it takes’ include ordering an offensive that kills hundreds of Americans and costs hundreds more arms, legs and traumatic brain injuries? What if eradicating al-Qaeda and ISIS requires a multi-trillion-dollar increase in either taxes or the deficit?" Friedersdorf asks. And of course the answer to both of those questions is, pffft. Neither Walker nor any other candidate, Republican or Democrat, is going to actually undertake a World War II style all-out war to eradicate Al-Qaeda, because Americans won't support such a war unless there's actually some sort of credible threat to the American homeland, which, at the moment, there isn’t. Americans want tough talkers, but they don't want anyone who will actually follow through on the tough talk.

And so, we get candidates who are hypocrites. Scott Walker is a duplicitous slug and quite possibly a fool, and good for Friedersdorf for saying so. But the fact remains that, given the choice between a duplicitous slug and someone who would actually declare some sort of all-out war on Al-Qaeda, I, too, would take the duplicitous slug. Hypocrisy is bad; massive unnecessary wars are worse.

The problem is that the hypocrisy itself leads to unnecessary violence. When you tell the American people over and over again that we need to eradicate ISIS for reasons of safety or morality or world peace, they may start to believe you. You may even start to believe yourself. This sort of mass and self-hypnosis can lead to invading Iraq, and then regretting it at length. Utter hypocrisy is hard precisely because people hold you to your words—and because it's hard to just lie over and over without making yourself believe just a little bit. America needs politicians who will admit that, yes, in fact, it's not in America's security interests to bomb everyone we can, nor to treat the world as our own little police state. America doesn't have the will or the resources to exert absolute military control over the entire earth. Admitting that would help us formulate a more rational, less violent foreign policy.

But, unfortunately, Americans don't like to be told that there are some problems that can't be solved by dropping bombs. And so, politicians are left with a choice. They can unleash an endless apocalyptic war forever upon the planet. Or, alternatively, they can lie.

Walker, Friedersdorf says, has chosen to lie. Walker claims he'll be so much more hawkish than Obama that he'll eliminate terrorists everywhere. But he won't be. He's a hypocrite not a blood-crazed sociopath—or, at least he's a hypocrite when he says he's as much of a blood-crazed sociopath as Republican voters want him to pretend to be. So one cheer for hypocrisy, I guess. Maybe at some point the American public will stop equating strong leadership with heaps of dead bodies. But until that time, I'd rather have a hypocritical politician than a politician who actually delivers the American people all the war they claim to want.

—Follow Noah Berlatsky on Twitter: @hoodedu

Discussion
  • Noah doesn't like Walker, which is clear. Problem is, Walker being a republican, there will never be a suficiently imminent threat, or enough dead Americans, for Noah to conclude something should be done. Now, should things heat up while the Light Bringer is still POTUS, it's katy bar the door. Which is one of those things Everybody Knows Already.

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  • Do you even read these things before you comment? Check out the first paragraph and the reference to the president who kills children. Who do you think that is?

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  • C.T. Yeah, I read it. Noah's view is whether something is politcally useful. Trayvon Martin is a child murdered for doing nothing while Miriam Carey is a nobody. Noah''s okay with the hypothetical drone strike as long as Obama thinks it's a good idea. Actually, there was no moral reproach in the first graf. Because Obama did it. Did you read the thing? Now, I'll give Obama more credit than usual when I say he isn't interested in interrupting his golf game to target--as in deliberately set out to kill--a bunch of kids. But stuff happens in war. And everybody understands it as long as a dem is president. You'lll note, for example, that since Obama was elected, no US troops have been killed in Afghanistan. It was (not) in all the papers. In addition, Noah pretends to believe that a politician who is either exaggerating or short-handing is to be taken literally--as long as he's a republican. OTOH, you can keep your doctor is perfectly fine.... You getting the point, here? I have no idea what Walker will do. That depends on the level of threat or horror. You'll recall the US sending troops to the Balkans where considerably less awful was going on. It depends on the actual or potential spillover. It depends on whether Egypt--which might be an ally at the time if Obama's pro MB tantrums haven't destroyed the relaitionship-is under existential threat from an organized ground invasion. It depends on a lot of things. One issue is that, as long as any dozen clowns have a twitter account and call themselves ISIS, ISIS hasn't been destroyed. So it depends,even, on the definition of "destroyed". But, anyway, my view of Noah's piece stands.

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  • "Noah''s okay with the hypothetical drone strike as long as Obama thinks it's a good idea." No! That is not said or implied at all. Read the first paragraph.

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  • C. T. I read the first graf. There is no moral reproach. "is that immoral?" is not answered. The point goes to how it's described afterwards. The graf uses the drone strike as a hypothetical to get to hypocrisy. It is not enough to point out that killing kids is immoral. Killing kids is just fine, depending on who does it. Ran across an article years ago by Sarah (Sally)) Miles on Low Intensity Conflict. The problem, Miles says, is that LIC works as the US and its proxies practice it, but it doesn't kill enough people to use as a propaganda tool. The left will have to think of something else. Now, when the FMLN killed kids, or the Sandinistas, or the VC, or the Khmer Rouge, that was absolutely fine, as in eggs and omelets, and....hey, look, a squirrel! Preferably, Walker will deliver all the war necessary and the libs will be biting his ankles all the way. The actual facts be damned, it's what the libs are supposed to do.

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  • From the first paragraph: "to defend whatever it is you think you're defending by killing children." Do you have any idea of how language works?

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  • C.T. I do, which is why I made my point. If there is a possibility that one could defend something by killing children, then defending the act implies the possibility that it's not immoral. It could be the lesser of two immoralities. Noah leaves open the possibility that Obama could legitimately defend the morality of this hypothetical act. It would be hard to think of a real-world example where setting out to kill children for the sake of killing children is going to be associated with fixing any conceivable problem, but that's the hypo Noah gave us. If children are killed in pursuit of, say, a terrorist HQ, or by accident, mistaking a bus for an armored personnel carrier, that's a different issue. Certainly, under the GC, the first is defensible and under the Just War Doctrine, morally defensible, given certain circumstances. But Noah did not provide any moral reproach except to imply Obama might try to make a case for it. But the real point is what Obama said or didn't say about what he'd do or not do.

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  • I like Obama pretty well. I think his national security policies are terrible and immoral. I didn't vote for him last time because of them. His refusal to prosecute torture is an international crime, and he should be in jail for it (along with Bush, Cheney, et.al.)// I don't like Walker. I appreciate that, if he is President, he isn't going to actually be as much of a murderous thug as he claims he will be in his campaign rhetoric.

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  • Noah, you're in a pickle. How do you square that you "like Obama pretty well" with the contention that he should be in jail? Have you any doubt that Hillary, if elected, will deviate from the non-prosecution of torture? I guess you'll write in Wonder Woman for president.

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  • Noah. Given your ability to play loose with the truth--Trayvon Martin was a child murdered for doing nothing--I'm not going to ask you what you actually know about the torture issue. But I would like to have you commit to a description of what it would take to justify a military action on the part of a republican president. Number of dead. Potential more dead number. Destroyed...cities? Installations? allies under threat? Right now, everything is pretty amorphous.

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  • Did you just notice that you have no idea what you're talking about? You start by saying that of course Noah -- the lockstep partisan Democrat -- would back military action taken by Obama. Noah shows up to say that he thinks Obama's "national security policies are terrible and immoral." So your assumption turns out to be completely wrong. And you ignore that.

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  • And how can anyone be confused by the phrase "to defend whatever it is you think you're defending by killing children"? The phrase doesn't hold open the possibility that there might be some good reason for killing kids. It implies that any policy reason that involves the killing of children must be a delusion because there can be no good reason to kill children. Clue: "whatever it is you think you're defending." Not actually defending.

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  • It certainly does hold open the possibility. If Obama were to defend the hypo, he might have what looks like a moral reason, as with many war decisions the least immoral. If Noah didn't like the idea altogether, he would have said something different. I'll give him the benefit of saying he might wish he'd phrased it differently. "by killing children" is presumed to have an irrefutably immoral load. Never can be defended. Problem is, practically anything can be phrased that way. So it doesn't count as a moral reproach. Can you think of winning say, WW II, if every move we made was forestalled if there were a possibility of killing children? Somehow, we need to be figuring how to defend that, or lament winning the war. it is one thing to be living among the victors slagging those who won. The point is, what would you, as war czar, have done. These questions might be directed at Obama with similarly valid answers. Now, of course, Noah BSs by implying the action is done with intent to kill children without any tactical or strategic goal. In fact, nobody's going to do that. Except ISIS, and they probably have some kind of justification for their fun. One critic of American Sniper said it showed Kyle killing women and children. While technically true, the woman and child in the situation were in the process of trying to kill Americans, with munitions in hand. Seems to me that might be useful to say, except if you want to make Kyle look bad. Now, if you want to take Noah's point and presume he doesn't mean Obama is setting out to kill children for the sake of killing children, he ought to tell us the circumstances. But, as with the guys who slagged Kyle, Noah is trying to make the Obana hypo look as if it was killing kids for the sake of killing kids. Noah (Trayvon Martin was a child murdered for doing nothing) would do that.

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  • Russ, I like many things Obama has done; he's probably the best President in my lifetime. That's a pretty low bar though, and he's still a war criminal. And of course HIllary won't prosecute torture. The fact that I'm given crappy choices; that's not intellectual incoherence. That just means I'm given crappy choices.//C.T., congrats on getting Richard to admit that the real problem with the essay for him is the blanket condemnation of killing children.

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  • The obsession with Trayvon Martin too...I'm sure you have good qualities, Richard, but none of them are apparent in this comments thread. If I were writing anything that you liked, I'd be pretty depressed.

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  • "It certainly does hold open the possibility." No, it doesn't. You understand writing like a dog understands color schemes.

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  • Noah. The reason for noting the Martin case is to make the point that you are lying. Clearly lying. No nuance. Lying. There are people who are doing that, hoping the lie becomes conventional wisdom, and you are one of them. And so holding any discussion with a person who will so clearly lie, clearly lie against the most obvious facts would be a waste of time. And, in fact, your point about my problem with the blanket condemnation is also a lie. Other than pointing out your lies, what's the point of discussing things with you?

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  • C. T. Maybe you're not as good as you think you are.

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  • C. T. Maybe you're not as good as you think you are.

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  • Richard...have you thought about yoga? Deep breathing exercises?

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  • Not as good as I think I am? We're talking about how you misunderstood a sentence written by somebody else. Not by me.

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  • Tried Yoga. Too impatient. But my orthopedic guy got me straightened out, so to speak. Have you thought of not being so obviously a liar? For grins, you could stop lying about the Trayvon Martin case. As I keep saying, everybody knows better, which makes you look bad. I'm trying to help you, here. It makes you look bad. Are you getting this? It makes you look bad.

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  • Richard, I appreciate your efforts not to make me look bad. Your object lesson in looking foolish online here is one I will take to heart. Thanks.

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  • Actually, Noah, you missed the point. Again. Getting caught lying makes you look bad. The more transparent and obvious the lie, the more people figure it out and the more people who figure you look bad. What you say about me doesn't actually affect that. And it wasn't me making you look bad. So, anyway, if you can figure out a way to be a good writer for, say, New Yorker, without telling lies, that would be a good thing. But, as they say in theater, there's acting against type which is the hardest.

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  • This comment thread reminds me of Thanksgivings past. Noah captures the surly condescension of a college freshman imparting her new found superiority to the family. C.T. playing the role of pubescent younger bro displaying his hormonal machismo by hyper-defending his big sis. Then there is Richard, the drunk uncle making some point only he understands. Thanks for the laughs and memories guys.

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  • For the record, I would vote for Wonder Woman as President. Who needs Air Force One when you already have an invisible jet?

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  • Good point Mary! I'm just not sure she would be able to get past the whole birth certificate thing.

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  • Aw, Texan. I am only incidentally defending anyone. Mainly I am attacking Mr Aubrey for being so bad at reading. It's a pet peeve of mine.

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  • Of course, your comment reminds us that there can be two drunk uncles at the same table.

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  • Well, let's try this a different way: Noah. What is the upside of telling people that Trayvon Martin was an innocent child murdered for doing nothing when everybody you say this to knows better? As to Obama and killing kids: Noah is pretending by clever--not as clever as he thinks--to claim Obama is setting out to kill kids for the sake of killing kids and thus can have no defense. My point is, among other things, Noah should prove that. If he can't, if the kids are killed in pursuit of what otherwise would be generally considered legitimate targets, we have a different set of defenses. Noah needs to pick one.

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