Ottomans and Zionists

In keeping with this week’s O&Z theme of highlighting poor commentary and analysis, the thread running throughout today’s gallimaufry is going to be more of the same. I’m not sure why I’ve been pulling an Andy Rooney routine lately, but there seems to be an unusually large amount of nonsensical drivel floating out there, so let’s plunge right into the dung heap.

Starting us off with first prize for the week, the month, and possibly the year is Daniel Pipes’ error-riddled and borderline hallucinatory head-scratcherat the National Review on Turkey and Syria. He opens it with this:

Why is the Turkish government acting so aggressively against the Assad regime in Syria?

Perhaps Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan hopes that lobbing artillery shells into Syria will help bring a satellite government to power in Damascus. Maybe he expects that sending a Turkish war plane into Syrian air space or forcing down a Syrian civilian plane en route from Russia will win him favor in the West and bring in NATO to intervene. Conceivably, it’s all a grand diversion from an imminent economic crisis due to borrowing too much.

Hmmm, let’s see…why is Turkey acting so aggressively? Don’t have the answer yet? Perhaps it’s because Turkey isn’t acting aggressively at all, but is responding to Syrian shells landing on Turkish territory and killing Turkish civilians. One would never know from reading Pipes that Syria shot down a Turkish plane, is hosting Kurdish terrorists who are launching attacks on Turkey, and ends up shelling Turkish border towns on an almost daily basis these past few weeks. I’m not sure that I’ve ever read a more Orwellian assault on basic facts than what is contained in this first paragraph. If you decide that you want to keep on reading – although I caution that if you do you are putting yourself at risk of an aneurysm – you will learn some other wonderful things about Turkey that you might not have been aware of, such as the fact that Erdoğan’s goal is to bring sharia to Turkey or that Turkey has abandoned the U.S. security umbrella (which must make it pretty awkward that we are still basing nuclear missiles on Turkish territory). You’ll also get to see some truly great logical consistency at work, such as when you compare, “Erdogan’s actions fit into a context going back a half-century” with the opening sentence of the very next paragraph, which is, “A new era began in November 2002 when Erdogan’s AKP, a clever Islamist party that avoids terrorism and global-caliphate rants, replaced the center-right and -left parties that long had dominated Ankara.” I could go on all day, but Brent Sasley beat me to it, so just read his takedown of Pipes instead.

Then you have David Brooks, who I always read and often find thoughtful but who wrote an entire column this week based on a ridiculous premise. Brooks listed a set of criteria for selecting a president who will make Washington less dysfunctional after opening with the following.

Voters have been astonishingly clear. In 2000, they elected George W. Bush after he promised to change the tone in Washington. In 2008, they elected Barack Obama after he promised to move the country beyond stale partisan debates. In this year’s first presidential debate, surveys show that viewers loved Mitt Romney’s talk of professionalism and bipartisanship.

In other words, primary campaigns are won by the candidate who can most convincingly champion the party’s agenda, but general election campaigns are won by the candidate who can most plausibly fix the political system.

With all due respect to Mr. Brooks, this is ridiculous. He plucked out something that he happens to care about, and without any evidence or data at all asserted that this is what decides elections. It’s no different than claiming that voters elected President Obama in 2008 because he is left-handed and then writing 800 words on why left-handed people make better leaders, or that President Bush won in 2000 because general election campaigns are won by the candidate who has more experience clearing brush. Bush and Obama both promised lots of things, so where is the evidence that it is a promise to change the tone in Washington that is decisive? As anyone familiar with basic political science knows, the economy is actually the best determinant of who will win the election, and the previous election fit into that pattern perfectly. So while voters might like to hear candidates who talk about bipartisanship, making a definitive statement that “general election campaigns are won by the candidate who can most plausibly fix the political system” based on nothing but conjecture is unlikely to convince anyone who cares about things like evidence, causation, or facts.

Finally, there is the story of Felix Baumgartner. For anyone who spent this week marooned on a desert island or happens to be Amish, Baumgartner took a ballon 24 miles up into space and then jumped down back to Earth, breaking the sound barrier in the process. It was an incredible feat which millions of people, myself included, watched live on Youtube, and it was a stunt that is actually going to lead to some important scientific and technological breakthroughs. There were many declarations last Sunday that Baumgartner’s skydive is going to inspire a new generation of astronauts and revitalize the desire for space exploration, and if that happens it will be a wonderful outcome. If you enter “Felix Baumgartner” into Google News you get 8.46 million hits, so his jump got plenty of warranted attention. It may come as a surprise to you though that Baumgartner’s jump was only the second most consequential development this month in the realm of space exploration, because the event that dwarfed Baumgartner by a magnitude of thousands didn’t get nearly enough attention. It turns out that NASA’s Voyager 1 probe, which was launched in 1977, just became the first man-made object to leave the solar system (!!!). Do you have any idea how astonishing that is? We have exited the freaking solar system and are now in uncharted territory, and somehow nobody seems to know or care. Comparing Baumgartner to Voyager 1 is like comparing the discovery of gravity to me finding a $5 bill in my coat pocket from last winter, and yet it is Baumgartner’s jump that is inspiring people rather than the fact that we have just exited our own star system. If you put “NASA Voyager” into Google News, you get 3,640 results. I weep for our future.