Do as I say, not as I do

Hillary Clinton: Women Who Say They’ve Been Raped Deserve to Be Supported and Believed
Juanita Broaddrick: Say, Funny You Should Say That

Not to mention this inconvenient actuality:

‘I never trusted a polygraph again’: Hillary Clinton LAUGHS in 30-year-old interview as she recalls how she helped a suspected child rapist walk free after the prosecution lost crucial evidence

Yeah, Hillary…tell me again how women (or girls, as the case may be) who say they’ve been raped should be given the benefit of the doubt.

 

On bad analogies and false equivalence

dilbert_analogy

Ratbert is your average Farcebook-meme-propagating regressive, it would seem:

No, the Muslims Fleeing Syria Aren’t Like the Jews Escaping Nazi Germany

Among politicians and their clingers-on, journalists, nothing takes hold like a bad historical analogy. Thus as politicians — 29 governors chief among them — call for a halt to our Syrian-refugee-resettlement program on the grounds that it might be exploited as a conduit for terrorists, pundits are invoking the plight of Jewish refugees fleeing Adolf Hitler’s Germany in an effort to soften American hearts. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank wrote Monday, “This growing cry to turn away people fleeing for their lives brings to mind the SS St. Louis, the ship of Jewish refugees turned away from Florida in 1939,” while his colleague Ishaan Tharoor contended: “Today’s 3-year-old Syrian orphan, it seems, is 1939’s German Jewish child.” Meanwhile, a Daily Kos headline shouts: “Replace ‘Syrian’ with ‘Jewish’ and we’re back to 1939.”

This is prima facie nonsense, which should be obvious from the terms being compared: Jews, an ethnic group, with Syrians, a national one. An honest, apples-to-apples comparison would line up German Jews and Syrian Muslims — the relevant ethnic group within the relevant political entity. But do this, and the failure of the analogy becomes clear.

The first, and most obvious, difference: There was no international conspiracy of German Jews in the 1930s attempting to carry out daily attacks on civilians on several continents. No self-identifying Jews in the early 20th century were randomly massacring European citizens in magazine offices and concert halls, and there was no “Jewish State” establishing sovereignty over tens of thousands of square miles of territory, and publicly slaughtering anyone who opposed its advance. Among Syrian Muslims, there is. The vast majority of Syrian Muslims are not party to these strains of radicalism and violence, but it would be dangerous to suggest that they do not exist, or that our refugee-resettlement program need not take account of them.