Politics

How SooperMexican Pissed Off Trumper Jeffrey Lord

So I posted a video of Jeffrey Lord over at the Right Scoop and provided some sooper commentary that he didn’t seem to appreciate. I have to admit, even by my standards, it was rather incendiary.

Here’s the post:

That was the original headline. Here’s the text I had in the post:

In seriously one of the stupidest segments I’ve ever seen on CNN, Poppy Harlow attempts to badger Trump supporter Jeffrey Lord with her feelings about dead Syrian kids, and then he blames Bush for 9/11.

Random word generators would make better arguments than these morons:

Poppy Harlow actually kneecaps Jeffrey Lord’s absurdly stupid contention that Trump’s ban would have stopped 9/11 by pointing out that none of the 9/11 hijackers were from countries that Trump has banned immigration from. This obvious fact doesn’t deter Lord from his blindingly idiotic zealotry, so he just ignores reality, which is an ability highly prized among Trump supporters appearing in the mainstream media.

I’m not sure what’s more stupid – Poppy Harlow screaming, “what about the children?!?!” or Jeffrey Lord ignoring the most obvious facts from reality that might undermine his faith in Trump.

I guess it’s conservative now to blame Bush for 9/11 with the idiotic talking points that liberals used a decade ago? And here I am accused of being a Hillary supporter by Trumpers. What bitter irony.

OK… perhaps I had a few too many tequila shots when I wrote it. Anyway, the substance I think is fair, even if I was a little too explicit about my disgust with the many offenses made to logic during the debate.

Well we got a response from Mr. Lord. I won’t reproduce it without permission but I added an update explaining the substance of his complaint:

We got an email straight from Jeffrey Lord who objected to my characterization of the clip. He says that he wasn’t attacking Bush, but merely pointing out that liberals attacked him for ignoring al-Qaeda warnings. He sent this article from the New York Times as an example:

eichenwald deafness before the storm

SO what he’s saying now is that he was NOT making the claim that Bush is to blame for 9/11, only using it as an example of how liberals complain when we’re complacent “according to the critic” as Lord said, and then complain when someone does something about it.

Since I wrote the original post, I’ll respond here. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt on what he meant when talking about Bush. Even so, he still opposed the two events, one characterized as inaction and the other as action, as if those are the only two choices. This is what is known as a “false choice” fallacy of argumentation. I’m sure Jeffrey Lord knows that, he’s a very smart guy. The fallacy lies in making it appear as if not doing what Bush did only gives you one other choice, which is what Trump did. And that’s simply not the case, which is why I thought the response was less than reasonable or rational.  In fact, he makes the ridiculous ultimatum once again at the end of the clip saying, “so let me see if I understand this, so in other words, you think that George W. Bush should have instituted this ban before 9/11 to prevent it!” When his interlocutor answers negatively, he exclaims, “Alright, so we should just sit back, and let 3,000 people be killed?” Perfect false choice.

But I wanted to give Lord his due.

Just so that we’re not accused of hiding anything, the original headline was amended to update with the information that he responded to our post, it was as follows: “CNN’s Poppy Harlow asks stupid question, Jeffrey Lord answers stupidly, blames Bush for 9/11.”

After this we noticed he also posted a response over at the American Spectator:

Bravo, Mr. President

He lumps me in with the Daily Beast, which is not the best company, and explains further what the point was that he was trying to make. But that doesn’t defuse the clear and obvious false choice fallacy he made during the segment.

So, sorry dude, you wrong. 

I’ll give him this much, his response was much more respectful than my drunken rant defending the honor of logic and reason. My apologies for that.