DSM and MSM - the sophistry of Michael Kinsley shows its ass again

[swag]

Excerpts from an "exchange" in the letters column of the New York Review of Books between Mark Danner and Kinsley:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18180

Kinsley:

But the DSM is worthless if it is not a smoking gun—not because I need a smoking gun to be persuaded (a "cynical and impotent attitude," Danner says), but precisely because people who don't require a smoking gun are already persuaded. And the document is just not that smoking gun. It basically says that the conventional wisdom in Washington in July 2002 was that Bush had made up his mind and war was certain. "What," Danner asks, "could be said to establish 'truth'—to 'prove it'?" I suggested in the column that it would have been nice if the memo had made clear that the people saying facts were fixed and war was certain were actual administration decision-makers. Danner asks, Who else could the head of British intelligence, reporting on the mood and gossip of "Washington," be talking about if not "actual decision-makers"? He has got to be kidding.

In short, the DSM will not persuade anyone who is not already persuaded. That doesn't make it wrong. But that does make the memo fairly worthless.

Mark Danner:

But it is Kinsley who is quite demonstrably wrong on this question. Whether or not the memo will "persuade anyone who is not already persuaded" is of course an empirical question and I know myself a number of people who have been so persuaded. And the fact that more than half of all Americans now believe the President and his administration intentionally "misled the American public before the war" seems a rather strong suggestion that, as a matter of persuasion and of politics, the Downing Street memo is very far from worthless.<11> The number of Americans who hold this view is likely to continue to grow. These are simply people who have begun to notice the widening gap between what they are told and what they see—a gap that, when it comes to the Iraq war, is becoming harder and harder to ignore. I would not call these people, in Kinsley's phrase, "Downing Street memo enthusiasts." Better to adopt a denigrating phrase from a Bush administration adviser and dub them members of the "reality-based community."<12> Their ranks are growing, and it may be that in the coming days some in the press will leave off the increasingly hard work of avoiding recent history and come and join them.