Josh Rosenau lends Hosni Mubarak a hand

Ever since the NCSE's Josh Rosenau made several embarrassing logical blunders in an exchange between this blog and his (see here and here), he has forsaken logical argumentation almost entirely in favor of juvenile insults and the hurling of primitive epithets. It's probably for the best, since his attempts at actual reasoning kept blowing up in his face.

It's probably not a good idea for a reputable science organization to put its credibility at risk by allowing Rosenau to stray far from the office, much less give him an official title, but such, apparently, are the standards now employed by the NCSE (The National Center for Science Education).

My original theory was that one of his parents worked for the NCSE and they took him to work one day and let him play at the desk and Josh started posting on the website, thinking he was a big person now. But, sure enough, when you go to the organization's site and scroll way, way, way down, there it is, a biography of their "Programs and Policy Director," where we are informed that Josh studied the "relationships between Philippine rodent species based on phallic morphology" at the University of Chicago.

Let's hope the Philippine rats he studied are better at operating the particular organ to which Rosenau devoted his undergraduate years than he is at operating a logical syllogism. If not, one could well wonder how the darn things survive at all.

Seriously, you would think Rosenau could at least inject some wit into his invective, but instead all we get this low grade name-calling that no self-respecting elementary school playground bully would be caught dead uttering publicly. Let this just be a lesson to us all: you go studying the male genitalia of Philippine rats as a young college student and the Peter Principle might just kick in early.

One of the epithets that got hurled this way was "logic-impaired." Anyone interested in investigating Rosenau's qualifications to make such judgments should check just several posts down, where he can find this statement: "good logic is only as valid as its premises."

Say whut?

Good logic is only as valid as its premises? Any logic student with a week's worth of instruction in logic could spot the problem in that assertion. Validity applies only to the deductive inference that occurs between the premises and the conclusion. It has precisely NOTHING to do with the premises themselves.

That's just an axiom in the morphology of logic. Even in the Philippines.

In any case, his most recent attack on this blog concerns my previous post on whether Internet access is a "basic human right." I asserted that this kind human rights talk as applied to Internet access was an example of "rhetorical inflation"--one more example of saying something we happen to like is a "right." And I pointed out that there are only two things you could possibly mean by such talk: that it was a part of what philosophers call the positive, written law or of the universal, unwritten (or "natural") law.

The first is civil, and it may or may not be based on the higher natural law. If it is, then it is a civil expression of the second; if it isn't, then it is a mere convention. If the civil law is based on the natural law, then it is a civil expression of real justice; if the civil law is not based on the natural law, then it only expresses a preference we all have and agree to for commanding or prohibiting something.

This simple disjunction, of course, set Rosenau to head-scratching. He just couldn't make anything of it:

First, assuming there is some sort of "inflation" of "rights language" ("rhetorical" or otherwise). Is that so bad? Is the suggestion that people have too many rights?

He then insists it must be metaphysical because it's possible to argue against some laws as conflicting with metaphysically granted rights (whatever that means), and then he doesn't really say how he'd assess that case.

Well, first off, what does "too many" rights have to do with it? The question is what grounds something metaphysically as a right. You don't determine that by going around counting them up. That method may make sense to an expert in the phallic morphology of rodents, but it doesn't constitute a respectable philosophical analysis.
Can we just make everything a right? Then there would be more rights and, under a Rosenauian analysis, that would be all the better. It would also excuse us from having to think hard thoughts, and that would certainly suit Rosenau.

And what does "assessing the case" mean? I asserted that the only ground on which you could criticize a written law is on the basis of a higher law. How else are you going to criticize it? On the basis of another written law? If so, upon what basis do you say the one written law is better than the other?

If you disagree with that, then you are basically saying you don't believe in justice.
Let me say this in the simplest possible way so I can communicate this thought to the NCSE's Program and Policy Director: You can't possibly critique a written law (whether statutory or constitutional) unless you have some perspective outside of the written law itself from which to do it. How do you argue that a written law is wrong unless you have intellectual fulcrum from outside and above the written law?
But perhaps this is too much for Rosenau to intellectually digest all at once, as evidenced by this comment:

I'd start with legal rights, rather than metaphysical ones, because how do you test whether something is a metaphysical right? One of the rights protected in the US's Bill of Rights is a protection of "freedom of the press." The founders thought that was kind of important, and lots of other countries borrowed that concept, sometimes even that phrase, as they created democratic constitutions in the 20th century.

(Yes, I know, this is an exercise in patience). You judge a metaphysical right by a legal right? Now that's a novel idea. You mean all you've got to do to establish a metaphysical right is to write it down and have everyone nod their head?

No. All you've got to is appeal to a group called the "United Nations." As long as the group has this name and it has a lot of countries participating in it (many of which are dictatorships with bad human rights records), their pronouncements are, apparently (in the world of rodent phallus specialists), infallible.

Conveniently for us, the UN crafted a Universal Declaration of Human Rights after World War II, and it was approved without objections by the UN General Assembly in 1948. Egypt voted for it then. The right to a free press is enshrined in it.

Well, I suppose that is convenient for people who don't understand much about natural law and don't apparently want to know much about it. Rosenau is very impressed with the United Nations. It's big. And it has lots of delegates. That gives it more authority than any other organization.

For Josh Rosenau, human rights is a matter of counting heads.

But then comes the real howler:

Though the Declaration is, like the US's Declaration of Independence, not a law itself, it exists to set out the rights that the community of nations agreed to be universal.

What? Is Rosenau saying that the Declaration of Independence simply "sets out rights ... agreed to be universal?" I guess he missed that part about "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights..." The Declaration doesn't leave off at social contract theory; it proceeds to invoke God in authorizing its "unalienable rights." And any theory that doesn't go that far (like the various U.N. documents Rosenau thinks came down from Sinai) simply begs the question.

If all you need is a bunch of people getting together and agreeing to something to establish the authority of a human rights declaration, what if something is wrong with it? Upon what basis would you judge it good or bad? Do you form the Super Duper United Nations to make an even better one?

And if you simply employ social contract theory, which theorist are you going to go by? John Locke? Rousseau? Or Thomas Hobbes, who advocated authoritarian monarchy? But isn't this just the problem in Egypt? Authoritarian monarchy (remember, he was grooming his son to take his place)?

This is the whole problem with human rights theorists who refuse to recognize a law above the law: they completely relativize the whole concept of human rights. If there are enough Hosni Mubaraks, then they've got just as much claim to the human rights mantle as anyone else.

Josh Rosenau: Hosni Mubarak's favorite human rights theorist.

Someone text this boy's parents and get his hands off the controls of the NCSE. Quick. Before this gets even more embarrassing.

Guilty White liberals giving lectures

White liberal Josh Rosenau of the National Center on Science Education, after claiming I was a staffer with "The Family Forum of Kentucky" (never heard of the group), quotes my article yesterday on Rand Paul and says I am "excited about Rand Paul's recent primary victory."

I am? Geez. I didn't even vote for the guy. What is it with these White liberals?

And then Rosenau goes on to give the obligatory guilty White liberal lecture about the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

I don't know, but I get the sense that Rosenau is a member of the party of George Wallace, Strom Thurmond, and former Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon Robert C. Byrd.

But I could be mistaken.

One last time

The National Center for Science Education's Josh Rosenau has a bad habit of stepping into it whenever he tries to score a logical point, and he has not disappointed us once again in his latest attempt. After I had mocked the propensity of Global Warming alarmists to take every warm weather event as evidence for Global Warming (as well as predicting lower rates of snowfall as a result of Global Warming) by taking note of record snowfalls, he characterized my argument as an example of the tu quoque ("you too'') fallacy.

I answered that remark in a previous post, but not apparently in terms that prevented him from saying that I was "admitting ... using a tu quoque." That I did the exact opposite apparently had some role in confusing him. I'll just have to conclude that he has apparently never encountered a reductio ad absurdum in his reading, and just didn't know what to do with it. He may want to add that to his list of things he needs to study up on.

He apparently tried to study up on another logical process, without much success:

[H]e deepens his obvious lack of training in logic by offering as the first line of a syllogism: "If individual warm weather events are confirming evidence for Global Warming, then individual cool weather events are disconfirming evidence for Global Warming."

This, to those who've studied logic, is known as the formal logical fallacy of denying the antecedent.

It is fortunate that I am experienced in correcting the logical errors of first-time logic students because it allows me to quickly spot and point out the fundamental error made in this argument; namely, that statements cannot be fallacious. Only arguments can be fallacious, not statements. In fact this is covered in the very first chapter of my Traditional Logic, Book I, and is probably missing in the Wikipedia articles from which Rosenau seems to have derived his knowledge of logic.

To say that the conditional statement above is an example of a fallacy is the kind of error that is literally covered in the first week of a typical course in logic, where students are told that statements can be true and false, but not valid or invalid. If Rosenau wants to argue that the statement is false, that's fine. But it cannot possibly be an example of the Fallacy of Denying the Antecedent. In fact, he took the statement from an argument which I not only laid out clearly, but highlighted, in bullet points, in which it serves as the major premise in an argument which denies the consequent, making it a legitimate Modus Tollens.

Maybe this is why Rosenau doesn't even provide a link in the entire post back to my post where that would have been evident.

And while we're talking about logical fallacies, Rosenau might want to revisit his argument that a group I have worked for, The Family Foundation of Kentucky is "affiliated with Focus on the Family," a charge which, if true, really wouldn't matter, but which, even after I have pointed out was false, he continues to repeat. He defends himself by saying that other groups in other states similar to The Family Foundation sometimes work in conjunction with Focus on the Family--and by providing links to various policy groups in other states, none of which is a link to The
Family Foundation itself.

Has Rosenau ever written a post in response to one of mine which he doesn't assert guilt by association? Josh, just admit your charge is false and you can't justify it for crying out loud.

I actually enjoy the give and take of debate, but in order to enjoy it, the person you are debating can't be constantly intent on name-calling, imparting false motive, and trying to score cheap debating points (and wreaking logical havoc in the process). Nobody is immune to these things (including myself), but when it becomes the rule rather than the exception, you just have to throw up your hands and ignore it--which, unless I have a compelling reason, I think is what I am going to do from here on out.

This stuff is just a function, I think, of intellectual maturity. Maybe, when Josh grows up, we can have a civil conversation. In the meantime, if I were the National Center for Science Education, I'd be more discriminating in who I let put my name on their blog.

Logic envy

It is fortunate that Josh Rosenau's blog is titled "Thoughts from Kansas," otherwise it would be hard to identify the exact nature of the verbal effusions emanating from it. But he assures us that the utterances he makes there are indeed "thoughts," and so we are bound to weigh them using the criteria one would normally apply to rational speech, although Rosenau's posts would probably fare better if we applied some other, much less demanding standard.

His most recent post is similar in almost every respect to his other frequent posts that target this blog for verbal abuse. In fact, we are fairly certain that he has a template post from which he just cuts the malignant text from some original boilerplate and pastes it into a new post every time he sees something on this blog he does not like, which occurs approximately once a week. In fact, we question whether his purpose really is, as he says on his blog, "battling creationists." There is no question he doesn't like creationists. In fact he seems to hate them as much as he hates the proprietor of this blog. And no doubt, in expressing his hateful "thoughts" toward creationists, he gives them, like he always gives us, a simultaneous lecture on the evils of hate.

Rosenau is nothing if not ironic.

But his real purpose in life seems to be to closely monitor this blog in hopes of finding something he can twist into a shape which he can then use to induce in himself the appropriate indignation, which he them proceeds to express with all the subtlety of a rabid wolverine. No doubt it's hard, when you're foaming at the mouth, to notice that you have committed the very transgressions you are accusing someone else of.

His most recent post begins in much the same way as all his posts about this blog begin: by calling me a Holocaust denier (despite the fact that I don't deny it), that I'm a bigot (because I think marriage means, well, marriage--among other things), that I write for the "Disco' Institute (they occasionally run pieces from this blog with my permission), and work for the "Kentucky affiliate of Focus on the Family (which is false, not that that seems to matter much to him).

The hurling of epithets--although they have gotten not only hackneyed, but rather dull--will undoubtedly subside as maturity sets in, although this process seems to be proceeding rather slowly for Rosenau. In has last post, immediately after the schoolboy name-calling, he turns around and accuses me of ad hominem attacks. It's one thing for your enemy to bend the barrel of your pistol back toward you, but it takes some ingenuity to do it to yourself.

Fire away, Josh.

Rosenau's most recent case of dyspepsia was the result of my post remarking about record snowfalls in an age of global warming. It got him pretty fired up. You would have thought I had exaggerated and concealed data, or corrupted the peer review process or something. This was an example of tu quoque argumentation, according to Rosenau. Now tu quoque is a Latin expression meaning "you too." Rosenau is not familiar with Latin, of course, but that is not really his problem. His problem is that he doesn't seem to understand English too well.

The tu quoque fallacy involves making some blunder and then, in your own defense, accusing your opponent of making it too. Good examples can be found on Rosenau's own blog where, every time I point out a logical blunder, he accuses me of the same blunder, the only difference being that he actually committed it and I didn't. I had pointed out the record level of snowfalls (something Global Warming advocates said there would be less of because of Global Warming--when they're not saying the complete opposite) and I pointed it out as a subtle way of mocking their own process only using opposite evidence. And when the Warmers began lecturing me about weather not being the same thing as climate, I simply pointed out that if it wasn't for me, then it shouldn't be for them.

But then we have already established that Rosenau does not get subtlety, haven't we?

In fact, Rosenau not only didn't get the subtlety, he completely missed my point. So let me put the implicit argument of my post in the form of a logical syllogism (And I should probably issue a warning, in doing so, about the possibility that Rosenau might once again try to imitate this exercise himself on his own blog with the usual amusing results):

• If individual warm weather events are confirming evidence for Global Warming, then individual cool weather events are disconfirming evidence for Global Warming
• But cool weather events are not disconfirming evidence for Global Warming
• Therefore, individual warm weather events are not confirming evidence for Global Warming.

Now this is not tu quoque argumentation, it is the logical process called modus tollens. But then we are speaking Latin again, aren't we? To someone who doesn't know Latin--or logic. Rosenau's logical vocabulary extends only to a few informal fallacies which doesn't really understand.

Oh, and that clicking you hear is Rosenau looking up Wikipedia article on modus tollens. It's worked for him before.

Or has it?

On further denying reality: Do sexual ambiguities support the distinction between sex and gender?

Our old friend Josh Rosenau of the National Center on Science Education (NCSE) exercises his idea of science (although perhaps 'exorcising' might have captured my meaning better) on the question of the meaning of the new political term 'transgender." Normally, the NCSE occupies itself in going around the country giving finger-wagging lectures on how creationism isn't science. But Rosenau lives a double life, on one day condemning creationism for not being science, and on the next championing political ideas masquerading as science--and feeling very scientific as he does so.

Someone really needs to keep him in his little laboratory so that he doesn't wander so far off in the logical wilderness that he can't find his way home.

I had made light of the idea being espoused in higher education circles (and, incidentally, the term 'higher' in the expression 'higher education' must now be taken in its pharmaceutical sense) that people can simply change their sex by deciding to be something else.

Josh the Science Man, however, abandoning the standards he claims to apply to other scientific issues, seems himself to be as intoxicated by the idea of "transgenderism" as the silly postmodernists that came up with the concept.

Rosenau--and another commenter on my blog--invokes cases like that of Caster Semenya, as evidence for the idea that one's sex can differ from his or her gender. Now, I hesitate to try to explain fine logical distinctions to Rosenau, a proud practitioner of the fallacies of guilt by association and undistributed middle, so maybe I should just ask him the question: What does the case of Semenya have to do with the question of whether sex differs from gender?

The case of Semenya, the athlete whose actual sex came into question because of her masculine characteristics, has nothing to do with a difference between sex and gender; it has simply to do with whether she's a male or a female. It says absolutely nothing about whether sex and gender are different categories of things.

Here's what the "transgender" advocates do: Whenever you question the legitimacy of terms like 'transgender', which, used the way it was used in the article I was criticizing, are political in nature. It's as if someone were to say that they believed that race and ethnicity were not distinct categories, and someone (I'm picturing Rosenau here) responded, "How can you say such things when there are people whose racial makeup is ambiguous?"

Does racial ambiguity support the idea that there is a difference between race and ethnicity? I strongly suggest to Rosenau's colleagues that they refrain from divulging to him the existence of such natural phenomena as mules, lest he conclude from their existence that biological species must therefore be distinguished from zoological groupings.

But Rosenau's remarks do prove one thing: there is a definite distinction to be made between being a science graduate student and being a logician.

Genocidal Correctness, care of Josh Rosenau

of Josh Rosenau, fresh off a post where, in the process of accusing me of fallacious reasoning, he lets go a textbook example of sophistry, continues on his campaign to cleanse the world of any imperfect thoughts on the Holocaust, casting aspersions and questioning motives as he goes. Not to mention blatant falsehoods he continues to perpetrate while in the very act of accusing others of untruth.

I suppose there's something that attracts the Rosenauian mind to silly little disingenuities like saying that Focus on the Family defends Holocaust denial, presumably because I have worked with a state-level conservative public policy organization that happens to be on the same side of certain social issues as Dobson's group, and he's got it in his mind that I defend Holocaust denial (despite the fact that, like, I don't). The remark doesn't even come up to the standards of guilt by association, since there is literally no association.

A guy's in pretty bad shape when he can't even execute his fallacies properly.

Under Rosenau's reasoning, everyone who agrees with someone else on one issue is automatically implicated in any other position that person happens to take. Here is Rosenau's reasoning in action, although in a way he probably didn't think about when he used it:

The Nazis believed in Darwinism
Rosenau believes in Darwinism
Therefore, Rosenau is a Nazi

Ouch.

Now I intentionally put this in the form of his favorite fallacy: the Fallacy of Undistributed Middle, a form of reasoning for which he has shown a marked inclination. Maybe Rosenau should stop trying to utilize logical procedures entirely until he gets some actual training in them. This is getting pretty pitiful.

But Rosenau's main point in his last post is that he has his pet definition of the Holocaust, from which, he declares, no one can dissent without being a Holocaust denier. Now I don't have any particular problem with his definition. In fact, I agree with it in all its manifold particulars. But is someone who does not agree with every jot and tittle of Rosenau's definition a Holocaust denier?

Apparently so, thinks Rosenau.

In fact, you can't even utilize a commonly given dictionary definition of the Holocaust without Rosenau raising his shaking finger and sputtering his fevered accusations about supporting genocide. He asked me what my definition was, and I gave him Merriam-Webster's definition, in response to which Rosenau says:

But Cothran's definition of Holocaust denial is almost weirder than Buchanan's Holocaust denial.

Yeah. Those Merriam-Webster guys. Probably a bunch of Holocaust deniers.

No, in Rosenau's world, there is not to be the least dissent on the most minute aspect of the issue. The Holocaust, he says, resulted in the killing of 6 million Jews. Exactly. Now I've heard how the Germans were efficient, but to have gotten it to exactly that round number. It's pretty amazing.

And you better memorize it too, because if you make a mistake and, in a moment of indescretion, utter a figure like, say, 5,999,999, then, well, Rosenau will be in your face telling you you are a Holocaust denier. I wonder what happens if you think there were 6,000,001 Jews killed in the Holocaust. Do you get extra credit or something?

And it's the same thing if you take a different view on how it was done--or when it was done. In one part of his post, Rosenau condemns Pat Buchanan for saying that the Final Solution (which I take as a reference to the actual planned extermination of the Jews in the system of concentration camps as we know it today) didn't get started in earnest until the beginning of 1942. Rosenau points to sources that say it started as early as the autumn of 1941.

That's right: If you believe the systematic killing of Jews began just 3 or 4 months later than some people believe, there's Rosenau, wagging his finger again, and accusing of denying the whole thing.

It takes a rather juvenile mentality to prosecute arguments like this. It's hard to believe that the Jews killed in the Holocaust would really give a rip about the exact number of deaths or the exact methods of execution or the exact dates they occurred. Most of them are unknown anyway.

To think that this is the important aspect of the genocide committed by the Nazis is to trivialize the whole sorry thing and take all the wrong lessons from it. The inhumanity of what happened isn't affected in the least by whether exactly 6 million Jews died or whether it was a million more or less. It was the fact that it happened.

But some people want to use these deaths for their own tawdry little political purposes. Seems a little unseemly, doesn't it?

Rosenau lays a logical egg

Sometimes when you try firing on the enemy, your weapon blows up in your hand. It's kind of embarassing.

Josh Rosenau, still trying to prove that someone who does not deny the Holocaust is a Holocaust denier, keeps digging himself in deeper, and making it more and more evident that he has some fairly serious logic issues. He had pointed to William F. Buckley's condemnation of Pat Buchanan as an "anti-Semite," characterizing Buckley as a Buchanan "ally," making his condemnation, said Rosenau, all the more remarkable.

Trouble was Buckley and Buchanan were not "allies." Buchanan is a paleoconservative, and Buckley, by the end of his life, a neoconservative. Rosenau contested this assertion, arguing that William F. Buckley was the "paleoconservatives' paleoconservative," a strange characterization, I pointed out, since virtually every leading paleoconservative repudiated Buckley, and Buckley took few paleoconservative positions.

One of the positions on which I pointed out was that Buckley was at odds with paleoconservatives was the recent issue closest to their hearts: the Iraq War. Rosenau's last response is illustrative of his problem in dealing with these issues logically.

Here is Rosenau's response to me in his last post "Apparently, I'm (almost) a paleoconservative":

If Martin Cothran is to be believed (and naturally he isn't):

The paleocons, almost as a matter of definition, opposed the war [in Iraq], and opposed it harshly.

I opposed the war in Iraq, and opposed it harshly, so "almost as a matter of definition, I'm a almost paleocon..."

This is supposed to prove how ridiculous the argument in my last post was.

I suppose I should be thankful that Rosenau is at least attempting a logical syllogism here, but syllogisms are best left in the hands of those who know how to operate them. He is attempting here what is called a reductio ad absurdum, which takes an opponent's assumption and tries to draw a logical implication from it that is obviously absurd, showing thereby, that there is something wrong with the assumption. In this case, however, the logical gun explodes in his hand (a common hazard for those who use them without proper instruction).

Let's lay out his attempted reductio ad absurdum neatly, with the proper logical notation:

Paleoconservatives^Pd oppose the Iraq War^Mu
I (Josh Resenau)^Sd oppose the Iraq War^Mu
Therefore, I (Josh Rosenau)^Sd am an "almost" paleoconservative^Pu

Rosenau thinks at this point that he has shown that my assumption leads to the conclusion he has come to in his little syllogism. At this point Rosenau does his customary end zone dance under the impression that he has scored.

But wait ... there's a flag! The referees appear to be calling back the play. Why? Let's go to the field...

Rosenau adds the little "almost," thinking he can insulate himself against a possible mistake, but, alas it doesn't work. He has, indeed, committed a logical error, with or without the "almost." He didn't notice, apparently, that this is a classic example of the fallacy of undistributed middle.

This happens when the middle term (the term that connects the major and minor terms together in the premises--in this case, "opposition to the Iraq War," indicated by the "M"), is "undistributed" (indicated by the "u"). Somewhere in the premises, the middle term must indicate all members of the class to which it refers (in this case, "those who oppose the Iraq War"); otherwise, it is not strong enough to connect the minor and major terms, as every conclusion must.

Neither instance of the middle term in the premises he gives refers to all those who oppose the Iraq War. "Paleoconservatives oppose the Iraq War" doesn't do it: it only refers to opponents of the Iraq War who happen to be paleoconservatives. "I (Josh Rosenau) oppose the Iraq War" doesn't refer to all those who oppose the Iraq War: it only refers to the one opponent of the Iraq War named "Josh Rosenau." So you have all those opponents of the Iraq War out there who are neither paleoconservatives nor Josh Rosenau. Most liberals, for example.

Neither occurrence of the middle term having been distributed, it cannot bear the weight of the inference.

You can see the fallacy easily by another argument of exactly the same form:

Crows^Pd are black^Mu
My car^Sd is black^Mu
Therefore, my car^Sd is a crow^Pu

Exactly the same illogical form:

All P is M
All S is M
All S is P

Therefore, you have no justification for concluding anything about Josh Rosenau being a paleoconservative--"almost" or not. In fact, the addition of "almost" just compounds his problem. When he does that he not only commits the Fallacy of Undistributed Middle, he adds to it the Fallacy of Four Terms.

It's a mistake that a first year logic student knows better than to make. I can't wait to show it to my students.

Josh's World: Anti-Semites under the bed

In a recent comment on my previous post pointing out that Josh Rosenau had ignored my questions about Obama, he charged me with “deliberately ignoring” his response. So I went back and read his post another time. I even searched it for the word ‘Obama’.

Nothing.

Was his response secretly encrypted in the post somewhere? Was it articulated in a secret language that requires some sort of decoder ring I have to send in for?

Here is his comment:

Are you deliberately ignoring my response to your questions about Obama? Are you deliberately ignoring my explanation of the ways in which BUCHANAN DENIES THAT THE HOLOCAUST HAPPENED? Are you deliberately obfuscating about Demjanjuk and the many other Nazi war criminals Buchanan has defended (even when they admit their own guilt)? Are you unable to understand that the charges Demjanjuk faces now are different than those he faced in Israel? Are you not aware that Germany has tried quite a few of its own war criminals, and that trying one's own criminals is generally regarded as a good thing?

Gee. It almost seems like Rosenau is ... upset.

He makes no response to my argument about Obama's ties to anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli individuals and then accuses me of falsely saying he made no response.

But then about a day later, he apparently realized he hadn't responded and then came back with a post that actually addressed my question--sort of. But, as yet, no retraction of his charge that I "deliverately ignored" his response.

I'm not holding my breath.

I made the argument that there was little more evidence that Buchanan is anti-Semitic than that Obama is anti-Semitic. If you accept the former, you are to some extent obligated to accept the latter. Now I don’t happen to believe that either Obama or Buchanan is anti-Semitic, although I think both of them are prone to poor judgment on occasion, the difference being that Buchanan has appeared briefly on radio shows by groups with questionable views, while Obama has actual processional and social relations with them.

I wonder what Rosenau would have said if Buchanan had been endorsed and had actually worked on projects with a man who called Judaism a "gutter religion" and Jews themselves "bloodsuckers." And I wonder what he would say if Buchanan had attended a church for over 20 years where the priest was a supporter of this man and who had a penchant for anti-Israeli rhetoric from the pulpit.

Josh Rosenau, meet Barack Obama.

Now despite all this, I don't really think Obama is anti-Semitic. I think, as in Buchanan's case, it involved poor judgment. But poor judgment and anti-Semitism are two different things. Rosenau has yet to admit that Obama's associations were even the result of poor judgment.

Rosenau is almost entirely unhampered by caution in these matters. The rhetoric on his blog is characteristic of much of the rhetoric of the political left: any disagreement is automatically attributed to the evil that lurks in the hearts of conservatives and the disingenuous motives that are the only possible reason anyone would disagree with them.

When people lose their real religion, they invest their other enthusiasms with religious meaning and purpose. Therefore, everyone who dissents from their views on anything is some sort of heretic, to be burned at the rhetorical stake. No one can be admitted to disagree with them out of legitimate motive. Their opponents are evil, pure and simple.

In this particular case, the Devil words used against the dissenters are “anti-Semite” and “Holocaust denier.”

And we apply them upon the least provocation, as when Rosenau went after Buchanan on the basis of his comment in his recent column on John Demjanjuk in which he compares the so far false charges against John Demjanjuk with the quintessential case of an innocent man being punished for crimes he didn't commit (Christ's crucifixion). I found the remark rather off-putting, but he was obviously writing the article on Good Friday and wanted to make some connection with the commemoration.

Rosanau, however, who is in a perpetual state of firing at will, accused him of of invoking the "Blood libel" (the belief that the Jews are uniquely responsible for Christ's death).

Yeah. Right. There is no room in Rosenau's world for anything but malign intent.

In fact, it is a startling irony that the fundamentalists they rail against would envy their black and white vision of the world: a place where there are no moral shades of gray--a dwelling place for the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness--and no one else.

If Buchanan had associated himself in any way with Louis Farakhan, does anyone really believe Rosenau would have left it out of his laundry list of anti-Semitic charges against him? Of course not. Buchanan is a conservative, and therefore inherently evil. But the association simply doesn't count against Obama, since Obama is one of the Chosen, which is why Rosenau dismisses it without remark.

In the case of Demjanjuk, I don’t know whether the man is a war criminal or not. But what is clear is that the charges that he has been tried on so far have been shown to have been entirely false. He was not Ivan the Terrible, as the OSI--and everyone else who jumped on the anti-Demjanjuk bandwagon--swore up and down he was. The trials in Israel proved that. If he’s guilty for some other war crime and it is proven (a step in the process that Rosenau seems to have little patience for), I hope they fry him.

In fact, I’m for the death penalty for war criminals who are responsible for the deaths of others. Is Rosenau?

The problem is that the credibility of his accusers is, if not completely destroyed, at least damaged to such an extent that the case now has the tone of a witch hunt. And now, since they can’t get him convicted in Israel, a place where, if anywhere, you would think people charged with anti-Jewish war crimes would get their just due, they are extraditing him to Germany, a country that has a vested interest in making others look responsible for what Germany itself played the chief role in doing.

Gen. George Patton, upon liberating the prisoners of Auschwitz, marched every citizen of the nearby town through the camp to see what they had let happen in their very own back yard. It’s a pity that wasn’t done with more Germans.

Now watch Rosenau accuse me of being anti-Teutonic.

An anti-Semite is not a person you disagree with about whether someone is a war criminal—or even whether someone else hates Jews. An anti-Semite is a person who himself hates Jews—as Jews. And since that requires divining someone's inner feelings about the matter, the charge is best left to those cases in which it is crystal clear.

But in Rosenau's black and white world, where those who disagree with you constitute an evil force simply because they disagree with you, this distinction is lost, and you can use the term as a club to beat others over the head with, apparently insensible to the fact that you are divesting the word of its true and legitimate use and, in the process, diluting its moral force, and thereby place those who are really guilty of it on the same plane as those who are not.

He invokes William F. Buckley, Jr., who accused Buchanan of anti-Semitism. I remember when Buchanan was excommunicated by Buckley. I also remember when the same procedure was conducted earlier with Joseph Sobran—in both National Review Magazine and First Things. It was unfair and politically reckless (and I was far from the only one of their readers who thought so)—as politically reckless, quite frankly, as some of Buchanan’s and Sobran’s own rhetoric (Political recklessness not being equivalent to anti-Semitism, a distinction we shouldn't have to point out, but do here because Rosenau doesn't seem to recognize it).

But here is Rosenau, closing in on the smoking gun in the Buchanan case:

He [Buckley] found that, while individual comments by Buchanan might be individually defensible from the charge of anti-Semitism, but that the entire gestalt is inescapable. [sic] [Emphasis mine]

The “gestalt”? Is this the evidential bar Rosenau observes in his moral crusade against the Forces of Political Evil? Gestalt? Why don't we just throw Buchanan in the water and see if he floats?

'Gestalt' is a weasel word designed to cover up the insufficiency of the actual evidence, and his application of it results in absurdities that are simply laughable. It's too bad the word 'gestalt' wasn't in Joseph McCarthy's vocabulary. He could have used it to prove there really were all those communists in the State Department.

Rosenau seems singularly impressed with Buckley's condemnation, finding it significant because nobody could say that the two weren't allied politically:

I find Buckley's condemnation significant because his political interests would have been best served by defending an ally against such charges.

Huh? No one who is even vaguely familiar with the infighting that goes in the conservative movement could say that about Buckley (a neoconservative) and Buchanan (a paleoconservative). It's also interesting that Rosenau would quote a man as a source who once called for branding AIDS sufferers on the rear end as a means of quelling the epidemic.

If I used Rosenau's standards of evidence myself, I could accuse him of wanting to brand AIDS victims, now couldn't I?

Given the low standard of evidence Rosenau seems enthusiastic in applying, it is no wonder he sees anti-Semitism around every political corner (except the one occupied by Obama). It also accounts for his belief that someone can be a Holocaust denier even if the person does not actually deny the Holocaust.

If they don’t actually deny the Holocaust, we can analyze their "gestalt" and divine it there.

Here's Rosenau, in high dudgeon, asserting once again something refuted in his own earlier posts:

Are you deliberately ignoring my explanation of the ways in which BUCHANAN DENIES THAT THE HOLOCAUST HAPPENED?

No. I'm just making the observation that the ways in which he has pointed out that Buchanan is a Holocaust denier do not happen to include ACTUALLY DENYING THE HOLOCAUST.

Rosenau's entire case against Buchanan being a Holocaust denier is based on the fact that there are a few people who charge him with being one. It doesn't matter that Buchanan has never denied the Holocaust. Others have said he did, so it doesn't matter.

But we have learned, haven't we, that, with Rosenau, the fact that someone is charged with something is tantamount to proof of guilt? We've seen that in his treatment of the Denjanjuk case. The fact that Buchanan himself has never denied the Holocaust, and in fact has referred to it has having happened numerous times (at least one example of which appears on Rosenau's own blog), is apparently considered non-material to his case.

Rosenau's slipshod and disingenuous way of dealing with this issue is illustrated in his accusation that Buchanan blames the Holocaust on Churchill. At best this is a flagrant overstatement of what Buchanan actually said. At worst, it is just false. What Buchanan argued is that Chamberlain (not Churchill), started a historic chain of events which gave Germany the motive and opportunity to expand his campaign of killing Jews by making an alliance with Poland that it could not follow through on, and consequently caused Hitler to move west rather than east against Russia. Now you may disagree with this judgment (as I do), but to say it is the same thing as Holocaust denial is simply ludicrous.

When Wolf Blitzer asked Buchanan whether Churchill was responsible for this, Buchanan said, "Churchill was not." Not only that, but in the same interview, Buchanan said the following:

Look, there's no doubt Hitler was anti-Semitic from the time even before he wrote [Mein Kampf]. What we're talking about, when you mention the Holocaust, for heaven sakes, is genocide. You're not talking about anti-Semitism. It was anti-Semitism in Poland in those years. There's no doubt that Nuremburg laws were in 1935. They were dreadful. As a consequence, half the Jews had left Germany before November 1938. Another half fled after that. They were outside Germany with the curtain fell.

What Hitler did was a monstrous crime, Wolf. It was a war crime. Had there been no war, there would have been no holocaust in my judgment.

Talk about taking a remark out of context. The leap in logic Rosenau takes is that if someone has a different theory of the chain of causes that led up to something, the person therefore doesn't believe in the thing at all.

If I think that global warming is caused by sun activity, then I must therefore deny global warming altogether. If I think that headaches are caused by muscle tension the spine receiving too much input from muscles of the head, I must therefore deny headaches.

There are people who think that the reason people in trailer parks experience more tornado damage is because tornadoes are attracted to trailer parks. The theory may be wrong. It may even be stupid. But it doesn't mean they deny that trailers are ever hit by tornadoes.

Not only that, but, using Rosenauian logic, we can also conclude that Pat Buchanan is a liberal, since he appeared on Wolf Blitzer's program. And since Buchanan made these remarks in an argument against American involvement in the Iraq war, and since Rosenau also opposes the Iraq War, that Rosenau is also himself a Holocaust denier.

Such is the Rosenauian logic.

The best argument Rosenau has is that Buchanan questioned whether it was diesel fumes that had killed prisoners at Treblinka. Of course, Rosenau then employs his patented skill in logic leaping to say that this means that Buchanan denies most of the deaths that make up the Holocaust--despite THE FACT THAT HE DOESN'T.

All the bad logic notwithstanding, Rosenau has yet to produce a single statement in which Buchanan denies the Holocaust.

The examples of faulty logic, flawed interpretation, and questionable facts are almost too many to list. He argues that if you appear on a radio program, you must therefore agree with the host. I don't know how you justify this inference, but it would be fun to apply it to Obama's appearance on Fox's O'Reilly Factor.

He argues that Buchanan could only have gotten his information on the reliability of Holocaust testimony at the Yad Vashem Archives from a white supremacist source despite the fact that it was from a Jerusalem Post story that was widely available on the Internet without the accompanying denial from the director of Yad Vashem.

He questions whether there is an Israeli lobby in Washington.

At some point, this kind of things just gets tiresome.

And then there is Rosenau's final leap in logic (Well, maybe not final: he seems to have a great facility for it). He has repeatedly accused me of "defending Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism." Now I could simply point out that I don't defend these things, but when has the truth ever gotten in the way of a Rosenauism?

Rosenau's logic (and I use that term loosely) is that if you believe someone is an anti-Semite, and you find someone who disagrees with you about whether that person is an anti-Semite, then the person who disagrees with you must ipso facto be an anti-Semite too.

If you believe that Roosevelt goaded the Japenese into attacking Pearl Harbor, then someone who disagrees with you about it is not only wrong, but thinks that Japan should have been goaded into attacking Pearl Harbor. If you believe that O. J. Simpson really killed his wife, then someone who doesn't believe it is not only wrong about Simpson, but believes that O. J. should have killed his wife.

Is the distinction between legitimately believing someone else is not an anti-Semite and being one yourself so fine that it is beyond the capability of a science graduate student? Apparently so.

This is the kind paranoia--the kind that sees anti-Semites under every bed--that results from a dogmatic political ideology that can't allow for legitimate disagreement.

How do I know Rosenau is paranoid? The entire gestalt is inescapable.