Political Hallucination: Centrism Revealed

Michael Medved routinely commits errors in basic logic and reasoning that are not, one guesses, supposed to be noticed by reasonable people. He vehemently insists, for instance, that US Senator John McCain, as a “conservative,” had picked Gov. Sarah Palin, even though he was (was supposed to be) a conservative candidate heading the political ticket. This is absurd. It was, in point of fact, because the majority of the Republican conservative base recognized full well that McCain was not a real conservative but actually a just liberal-moderate Republican, thus, he had to then reach out to that largely alienated base by necessarily picking an actual conservative as the VP candidate.

The fallacy in logic employed by Medved is the obviously classic one known as post hoc, ergo propter hoc ratiocination, meaning, in essence, the always incorrect employment of an illegitimate, backwards form of incongruous and, thus, incorrect reasoning.

The erroneous thinking, on his part, can be easily illustrated, furthermore, in political-historical terms of reference. In 1980, for instance, Ronald Reagan, because he was, thus, conceived to be a conservative in terms (at a minimum) of the Republican Party had decided, however, to try to somewhat appease the liberal-moderate wing of the party; this was deliberately done by choosing George H. W. Bush as his VP candidate; this was meant, of course, to help unite the party, as was the failed effort true for McCain in 2008. The problem is, as is known by people knowledgeable about domestic politics, that people still mainly look to the presidential candidate in determining who to vote for, not typically the VP slot.

The Republican Party’s candidate this year was, manifestly, a liberal-moderate who was easily known, especially by most Republicans in the conservative base, to be, in fact, a liberal-moderate, not any kind, shape, or degree of a true or even a mainstream conservative. Medved, who must be continuingly hallucinating quite terribly, insists that those who say that a truly conservative candidate would have won are all wrong; he bizarrely states this, of course, by his keeping on insisting that McCain is a real conservative, which is, however, plain and unadulterated nonsense of the highest order imaginable.

Those who are on the political Left (and their known fellow travelers, the neoconservatives,) are the ones who, routinely, go around calling politicians such as McCain conservatives, when the Left wants to ultimately defeat them in contested elections and, alternately,” mavericks” when wanting to use them against conservatism. Conservatism, as is known, did not lose in 2006 or 2008, the absurd and, thus, defeatist appeal to centrism or moderate politics is what lost, as rightwing thinking, for instance, did not lose but won, rather spectacularly, in the 1994 elections.