Well, Timing– what have you got to say for yourself?

Eric has recently ranted on a popular pasttime, namely questioning the timing of things. And since that post President Bush’s payroll records, which the Pentagon previously thought had been destroyed, have surfaced. Every news outlet that lets out to my little apartment has been repeating the refrain that some have “questioned the timing” prefacing the caveat that the records offer nothing new to the speculation over the fulfillment of the President’s service obligations.
So what then is this business of questioning the timing?
With Sandy Berger the case is clear enough. Berger did something wrong, and the timing of the release raises a specter over the Kerry campaign and the looming Democratic convention. To question the timing there is simply to suggest that the issue was made public not to expose a wrong, but to deal a political blow. It casts doubt upon the sincerity of the revelation, though it in no way absolves Berger, though it is clearly meant to blur the focus.
Now to question the timing when the president’s pay records surface, and to preface that question by noting that it proves nothing, leads one to wonder what the point of the question might be. And ultimately its not far off from the Berger case.
While it’s true that the records prove nothing about Bush’s stint in Alabama, they in the very least do not help the DNC’s outrageous claim that Bush went AWOL (even Kerry finds this distasteful), a claim taken for granted by the pom-pom crowd who argue every foul a fair ball for the ol’ home team. (Did I take the politics-as-baseball analogy too far?)
The AWOL charge smells familiar to me. Maybe that’s because I’m an old fashioned philologist who spends an inordinate amount of time weeding through senseless speculation and conjecture in modern scholarship. I’ve been called a positivist, which is supposed to be a bad thing in these days of historicism run amok, dressing up common sense in jargon and calling it a revolution. But I digress.
To claim that Bush went AWOL is empty rhetoric unless the Texas Air National Guard declared him AWOL, which it did not. Still, the claim is enough to get the faithful fired up, and the burden of proof is transferred to the accused. When nothing concrete can be produced to say, “George W. Bush did not go AWOL,” signed by a superior officer, the chorus begins an odious ode that hints us toward the tragic discovery.
But do we really demand that people disprove unfounded allegations? This is a short step from an ad hominem attack, and these kinds of fallacious red herrings are tossed out daily by leftists. A friend reminded me just yesterday about the bait set for him by a professor once in a lecture. Against the prevailing historicist tide my friend argued that Plato and Aristotle were more than products of a given time and culture, and that individual thought and universal truth is possible and can be understood from a text.
The professor’s response was that Aristotle thought women were inferior.
It’s been a long road here, but this is the crux: To question the timing, to speculate about the worst cause of an unclear event (like those who wondered whether Bush ‘went AWOL’ to avoid drug testing), and to counter a valid argument through an ad hominem attack is part and parcel of the leftist worldview.
There are no facts, no universal values, but only interpretations and possible “readings.” Rather than focus on what we know, we focus on what could be; rather than address this issue, we become distracted by that.
What more would you expect from the people who brought you the vast right wing conspiracy?