You?ve heard of Jon Sanders? ?but-face.? Now Commentary magazine editor John Podhoretz introduces us to the ?no, but? argument ? as practiced by Slate?s Jacob Weisberg in the days following the Tucson shootings. (Click here for a subscriber link to Podhoretz?s full column.)
Some began advancing the idea that this was a ?teachable moment? about the dangers of violent rhetoric. Ah, the teachable moment. That is the schoolmarmish way of announcing the onset of a public re-education campaign designed to impose the American liberal sensibility on everyone who has not yet breathed it in. When you have a teachable moment, it doesn?t matter whether the motivator was true or false?whether, in other words, violent rhetoric had anything to do with what happened.
Weisberg didn?t go in for the teachable-moment thing. Instead, he aired out a ?no, but? argument that I expect will become axiomatic for liberals going forward?one that seems at first to acknowledge the truth before drowning out the truth with ideological, emotional, and rhetorical slander.
No, Loughner was not a Tea Partier, but (according to this view) he might as well have been. Tea Partiers dislike Washington and Democrats, and Gabrielle Giffords is a Democratic politician in Washington. And no, he was not a conservative, but conservatives tend to support the idea that the Second Amendment grants Americans the right to own guns, and he was able to buy a gun. Moreover, Republicans and conservatives like Sarah Palin often use ?violent rhetoric? when discussing the defeat of their ideological adversaries at the ballot box?terms like ?lock and load? and ?reload??which served as the amniotic fluid in which his crime gestated.
If the “no, but” argument sounds silly to you, you’ve got the right idea.
