If you read Kilcullen’s book, which I reviewed on Amazon a week or two ago, there could be something in this. The trouble is, I don’t trust Obama to get this right. The Taliban are in Pakistan and may well take over the country, including its nukes. The Afghans are extremely primitive people who cannot be brought into the 21st century in less than 50 years. I’m talking about the society, not individuals. There is a nurse from Afghanistan who works with my wife. The villages are little changed from 1897 when Churchill wrote The Malakand Field Force, which is still in print and read by our troops.

The infiltrators, who are called “The Crazies” by the Afghans, cannot be dealt with but they are only about 3% of the people who are fighting us at any given time. They are the suicide bombers and the ones who invade the capitol.

I just don’t think the Obama people are knowledgeable enough or smart enough to do this. They’ll mess it up although I think Afghanistan may be lost anyway. He may be trying to save face.

When the U.S. reached out in Anbar, it was not to al Qaeda, but Sunni tribes in the area. Reaching out to the Taliban is not the answer, reaching out to Pashtun tribes and Pashtun leaders may be. It is a subtle but important distinction that the NYTs and (more scary) the Obama Administration don’t seem to get.

It Has Begun: Obama Announces He Is Open to Appeasing Taliban

In a shocking move Barack Obama announced today that he was open to appeasing the anti-American Taliban fundamentalists.
Astute Bloggers caught this from The New York Times:

President Obama declared in an interview that the United States was not winning the war in Afghanistan and opened the door to a reconciliation process in which the American military would reach out to moderate elements of the Taliban, much as it did with Sunni militias in Iraq.
But, lets be clear… It’s only the “moderate elements” of radical Islamist fundamentalist organization that he is interested in appeasing.

Who might that be?
The moderate members who hide women under dark cloaks?
The moderate members who keep women from holding jobs?
The moderate members who burn down barbershops and bomb girl’s schools?
The moderate members who believe in Shariah law?
The moderate members who beat women in public?

http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2009/03/shocker-obama-announces-he-is-open-to.html

The world has been awaiting those moderate radicals! People like Hax will be so pleased.

Ah, but Jeff did in the first sentence of his actual post and then accused Patterico of lying about it, whether he knew it or not in the comments. This is a flat out back track from Jeff, whether he acknowledges it or not.

“But what we REFUSE TO ACCEPT is any formulation of Rush Limbaugh’s words that don’t respect his intent.”

I don’t believe Patterico suggested that you should have to, but I’m happy to be proved wrong.

_________________________________________________

Jeff failed to see where he called Patterico a liar or misrepresented his position in the last kerfuffle, so at least he’s got consistency going for him. I thought he was going to leave it alone.

Comment by Jeff G on 3/7 @ 1:50 pm #

Patterico’s not a sell-out artist that some people claim he is here. It’s obvious that commenters like BigD and Joe don’t want to take the time to try to understand what he is saying and instead for whatever reason insist on being spoonfed like leftist morons.

Thr first sentence of Jeff’s reply to Patterico after quoting his post was a glib of an argument not made by Patterico:

“In suggesting that the trouble here is that Republicans are straddled with the burden of having to explain Limbaugh’s nuance, Patterico (and Allah) are not only conceding the linguistic ground to the left, they are now actually helping perpetuate what, at least on Patterico’s part, he knows to be a lie**….”

Although I’m not particularly happy with Patterico’s position on Limbaugh, I didn’t recognize the position Jeff described.

That line, to recap, followed from this, which I quoted:

I know: when [Limbaugh] says he hopes Obama fails, he doesn’t mean he wants to see Americans suffer. He just doesn’t want liberal policies enacted because he thinks they’re bad for the country. I get it. I agree with that.

But, you know, that’s nuance.

The problem is, Americans have short attention spans and don’t always do nuance well. Just by writing the title of this post the way I did, I’ll get an angry reaction from some — even though, if you read the post, I haven’t said anything particularly negative about Limbaugh. As Allahpundit says:

“It’s Republicans who are suffering from having to thread the needle between defending Limbaugh and rejecting the “I want him to fail” rhetoric. What harm has Rush suffered? His stature’s never been greater, as he himself acknowledges right here.”

Indeed.

In the quoted portion, we get several admissions and assertions. 1. Patterico “gets” what Rush meant. 2. What Rush said was provocative, and understanding him required nuance. 3. Americans have a short attention span and “don’t do nuance well.” 4. Per Allah, the result of Rush’s provocateurism — coupled with Americans’ general lack of nuance — is that “Republicans [...] are suffering from having to thread the needle between defending Limbaugh and rejecting the “I want him to fail” rhetoric.” 5. More, Rush hasn’t suffered from this — only Republicans forced to try to defend him have. 6. To which Patrick agrees: “Indeed.”

Now let’s look at my response again — the one that “misrepresents” the quote it follows:

“In suggesting that the trouble here is that Republicans are straddled with the burden of having to explain Limbaugh’s nuance,[2,3,4,5,6] Patterico (and Allah) are not only conceding the linguistic ground to the left, they are now actually helping perpetuate what, at least on Patterico’s part, he knows to be a lie**….[1]”

Nowhere have I ever argued that there aren’t times for changing rhetorical strategy based on audience, context, etc. In fact, I would argue that of course one needs to do so. But the context here was a conservative radio host being asked to give preemptive support to a man who he identifies as a threat to our system of government. Further, the host has an established style. And his audience expects a certain kind of formulation. If anything, Limbaugh matched his utterance precisely to his intended audience(s). And I say audiences because, like Howard Stern, Rush knows that much of his audience is those that hate him and are looking to try to take his words out of context. Does he bait them to do so? Of course. Is that a winning strategy? For him it’s been. But what Patterico wants to know is, is this a winning strategy for Republicans and conservatives?

His answer is no — and in making that argument, he is essentially saying that Rush Limbaugh is either 1) doing his job poorly as a voice for conservatism, at least in this instance; and 2) Patterico thinks there is a better way for Rush to do that job.

This is a question of tactics and taste, for Patterico — and nowhwere have I made the claim that those aren’t valid concerns.

Still, my post links two instances — Bill Bennett’s “racism” problem, even though he clearly tried very hard to frame his argument in a way where it couldn’t be taken out of context; and Tony Snow’s use of “tar baby”, wherein his accusers literally admitted to knowing that he meant nothing racial by the use of the phrase, which has several established meanings.

In both instances, the left was able to take meaning and resignify it a way that it would be used to taint conservatives with racism. And in both cases they should not have been allowed to do so — because that is not how language works, unless WE agree to allow it to work that way. And if we do, we cede the grounds of meaning to those who would presume to tell us what it is we mean.

In the case of Limbaugh, might he have used a more diplomatic approach? Naturally. Would a different approach have proven more productive for conservatism, or more helpful to Republicans? That’s debatable: from my perspective, anything that shines a light on the way the left coopts meaning is useful. From Rush’s perspective, it builds his brand. Patterico and Allah think Rush’s utterance, in this instance, made things difficult.

Fine.

But then, I never said that Patterico and others were ceding ground to the left intentionally or even knowingly. What I’m arguing is that the impetus for questioning the way Rush delivered the line is the concern that his doing so makes it difficult to defend him, because it requires nuance to get around what we know the left will do with such an utterance. And that could be avoided.

My contention is there are several ways to avoid such a thing. Patterico and Allah illustrate one such way — a kind of self-editing in the utterance. But that is really up to the speaker — and, because none of us are Rush Limbaugh, we aren’t responsible for his meaning or way of making his point.

The other — and to my mind, proper — way to avoid this kind of discomfort is to point out that Rush speaks for himself, and that his meaning was clear. He meant what he meant.

If you would like then to argue about whether what he meant is a valid wish, let’s do so. But what we REFUSE TO ACCEPT is any formulation of Rush Limbaugh’s words that don’t respect his intent. Which is precisely what the media is requiring us to address: their refiguring of Rush’s statement, cropped and edited in a way that is most suggestive of nefariousness on his part — and formulated that way intentionally to put us on the defensive.

As the Bennett and Snow examples show, ANYTHING can be excerpted and used in this way — precisely because we allow it to be by giving credence to a certain idea of interpretation that is, by its very nature, incoherent, and also by its very nature undermines the common ground for meaning, and so opens up discourse to meaning by will and consensus of motivated groups who simply insist the loudest.

This is not how language works, and to accept those premises is necessarily to cede ground. Given that the only reason we are concerned about Rush’s tone is that we fear we’ll have to explain ourselves to unnuanced Americans once the press is able to formulate his statement in a way that suits them, it is my argument that it is best to stop the latter than to worry ourselves over the former.

The former is a tactic. The latter is is the strategy. And it is the strategy that needs to be defeated.

In short, we are happy to have a discussion about what he MEANT, if that’s something that needs discussing (and of course, further, we are under no obligation to do so: Steele can just tell people to ask Rush about what Rush said, because he’s quite capable of explaining it); but we will no longer — and SHOULD NO LONGER — dignify questions that begin by taking us out of context.

And rather than worry that because unnuanced Americans will buy into such dishonest formulations, we should alter our formulations (which the Bennett and Snow examples prove is a losing strategy), it is time instead to insist that the dishonest formulations be treated as such, and called out as such, so that it becomes unproductive for the media to continue the practice.

Jeff G’s comment

He’s a hard, hard left-cult commenter with standard BDS, anti-conservative bullshit talking points and complete revisionist world history. My choice – gaming the argument because he’s just a fuckstick by nature.