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Entire ABC panel destroys neocon Bill Kristol for backing ‘ends justify the means’ culture
By David Edwards
Sunday, March 16, 2014 12:55 EDT
Neoconservative Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol on Sunday faced an entire panel of pundits who rejected his defense of the CIA’s torture program, and the agency’s effort to cover it up.
During a panel discussion on ABC’s This Week, Fox News host Greta Van Susteren said that Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) should be calling for a criminal investigation of the CIA after the agency allegedly searched Senate computers — and removed documents — to undermine an investigation of a controversial interrogation program that included techniques like waterboarding.
“I will defend the intelligence community against a bunch of senators and their staff,” Kristol insisted. “And I will defend the interrogation program!”
“First of all, Bill, it is not an interrogation program, it’s torture,” The Nation Editor Katrina Vanden Heuvel explained. “Second of all, Sen. Feinstein has been a great defender of the intelligence community. She is now saying, without effective oversight, secret government is not justified in a democracy.”
“There should have been prosecution,” Vanden Heuvel added. “There should have been accountability. We now have two administrations or more implicated in this. President Obama should have prosecuted, held accountable. What we now need… is a new Church Committee.”
“Eric Holder, President Obama’s Attorney General, did a criminal investigation!” Kristol shot back. “In my view, a disgraceful investigation looking backwards at CIA officials who were doing their jobs. He found nothing illegal.”
“Either we’re going to be transparent or not,” Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson told Kristol. “When we talk about the CIA, regardless of who is in the CIA director's office, whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican, the fact is they will remain there after the president is gone.”
“You have to deal with the persistence of a shadow government established by a spy agency,” he pointed out.
“This is what happens when we have culture where we argued that the ends justify the means,” former George W. Bush aide Mathew Dowd observed. “When we have this whole culture that basically says we can do what ever it takes so that we don’t have terrorism, to preserve security. These kinds of things happen when you have a culture that the ends justify the means.”
Watch the video below from ABC’s This Week, broadcast March 16, 2014.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/03/16/entire-abc-panel-destroys-neocon-bill-kristol-for-backing-ends-justify-the-means-culture/
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Full article posted with permission
36 replies
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But first, I guess, to do so, you'd first have to spell it correctly. I suspect that if I started a thread ranting about the non-deific evidence of Jesus of Nazareth, I'd probably hamper any credibility by spelling his name 'Jeebuz'. It's hominem. Not hominen.
Now, I know what this term means. The question is, do you?
From Wikipedia, the be-all-end-all-authority on all internet message board quibbles large and small, thusly excerpted.
An ad hominem (Latin for "to the man" or "to the person"
, short for argumentum ad hominem, is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument. Fallacious Ad hominem reasoning is normally categorized as an informal fallacy, more precisely as a genetic fallacy, a subcategory of fallacies of irrelevance. Ad hominem reasoning is not always fallacious, for example, when it relates to the credibility of statements of fact.
, short for argumentum ad hominem, is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument. Fallacious Ad hominem reasoning is normally categorized as an informal fallacy, more precisely as a genetic fallacy, a subcategory of fallacies of irrelevance. Ad hominem reasoning is not always fallacious, for example, when it relates to the credibility of statements of fact.To your point, and more relevantly...
Abusive ad hominem usually involves attacking the traits of an opponent as a means to invalidate their arguments. Equating someone's character with the soundness of their argument is a logical fallacy. Mere verbal abuse in the absence of an argument, however, is not ad hominem nor any kind of logical fallacy.
Ad hominem abuse is not to be confused with slander or libel, which employ falsehoods and are not necessarily leveled to undermine otherwise sound stands with character attacks.
Ad hominem abuse is not to be confused with slander or libel, which employ falsehoods and are not necessarily leveled to undermine otherwise sound stands with character attacks.
Emphasis in that last excerpt was mine.
Now, if you thought the poster was verbally abusive, it may be an alertable violation, but it is not ad hominem. If it is merely an attack on the presenter of the argument rather than the argument itself in the context of an argument, it is ad hominem, but it isn't a violation.
If it bothers you so much, why not take the opportunity to shred the argument and be done with it?
...and smack the shit out of it. It'll be flat then, and of just as much use to the world as it is now.)
"Wrong About Everything" should be his middle name. 
like Friedman and Brooks.
