i found these in a brand new AP article by way of the post.
"I think I get is [sic] darn good intelligence and the speeches I have given are backed by good intelligence," Bush said. However, the administration has acknowledged the uncertainty of remarks Bush made in his January State of the Union address about Iraq's alleged attempts to buy uranium in Iraq [sic].
and
"I think the bottom has been gotten to," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said earlier Monday. "No one can accurately tell you it was wrong. That is not known," he said.
so, i went back to the old logic textbook.
the first is a simple contradiction. easy enough. so long as the several premises contain implicitly contradictory terms like "good" and "uncertainty," there is an inconsistency. purists would of course be troubled by my messy coupling of bush's and the AP's premises (1: the president gets darn good intelligence, and 2: there were uncertain remarks in a speech that followed from that darn good intelligence). no doubt "uncertainty" isn't an often-used term at that end of pennsylvania ave right now. yet the unstated conclusion (the speech was "darn good") is flawed.
i got frustrated looking for a classification of the second fallacy. maybe it doesn't quite make the standard of fallacy? i thought that resovling the question of "that [which] is not known" was precisely what's at "the bottom."
it helps me to write these down somewhere, and mt looks prettier than ms word.
Posted by dave at July 14, 2003 3:52 PM | TrackBackYou know, when an estimated 7,000 people have died, "darn good" (classic Bushie Roy Rogers language=trivializes the significance of the misleading information) seems like a pretty mediocre standard. I'm also struck by the inarticulate language of both Bush and Fleischer's comments ("the bottom has been gotten to?"). This is the language of someone who is retreating fast. It's also misleading in that it elides the fact that *forged documents* are by defintion "wrong," at least to the extent that either intel was duped by the forgeries or they were used to mislead the public. Even if it turns out to be true that Saddam ws trying to buy uranium, the "conviction" was based on false evidence that would never stand up. Unbelievable.
Posted by: chuck at July 14, 2003 5:17 PM | Permalink to Commentand that unbelievability gets more believable by the hour.
the article has been edited. new versions are less damning than that "bottom has been gotten to" business, but their point remains:
Defending his administration, Bush said, "I think the intelligence I get is darn good intelligence. And the speeches I have given were backed by good intelligence.
"And I am absolutely convinced today, like I was convinced when I gave the speeches, that Saddam Hussein developed a program of weapons of mass destruction and that our country made the right decision."
The administration said the questionable intelligence claim was simply one piece in a long, documented list of evidence showing that Iraq was trying to acquire material for nuclear weapons.
[...]
"We don't know if it's true but nobody - but nobody - can say it was wrong," White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said. "That is not known."