Docudrama

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Critical thinking skills are vital when tackling the issues of the day, but we just don’t use them enough.

Well, it took a little time, but after 15 rounds of voting Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) was finally elected Speaker of the House in the wee hours of the morning last Saturday. The 118th Congress was quickly sworn in and got to work immediately. 

Or almost. The first order of business was passage of the House rules, which didn't come until Monday. The rules package contained all the concessions McCarthy had to make to the Freedom Caucus in order to seize the gavel, some of which certainly weaken the power of the speaker compared to the previous Congress.

Whether they render Speaker McCarthy virtually powerless, as some of the more strident news outlets claim, remains to be seen. But he unquestionably is going to have a harder time wrangling the more extreme elements of his conference into line.

That sounds like mostly his problem, but it's actually a problem for all of us. If a speaker can't deliver votes as promised, it's hard for them to strike a deal. And with such a closely divided House and Senate, dealmaking is going to be more important than ever. 

The rules also contain a couple items which aren't directly related to the ability of the House to do the People's legislative business. One in particular is going to be problematic: a committee House Republicans are setting up to "investigate the investigators." 

Supposedly, the purpose of the committee is congressional oversight of the executive branch, which is an absolutely legitimate and vitally necessary function of Congress. But one section of the committee's authority allows it to delve into "ongoing investigations" -- and that's where the problem lies. The Department of Justice is still actively investigating the riot of Jan. 6 with an eye toward prosecuting any and all individuals who were involved.

Some of those individuals are currently sitting in the House. Some may even be members of the committee themselves. Which means the investigation of the investigators may be done by the very people being investigated.

Not to mention, there are various laws, rules and regulations about the disclosure of information in ongoing investigations, many of which the committee will have to violate, or ask witnesses to violate, in order to do what it is apparently planning to do. It's not something which sits squarely within the concept of the rule of law.

Of course, anyone who has watched a congressional hearing live or on C-SPAN knows how much political grandstanding to expect (the real committee work is done out of the public eye). We can be sure this one will be no different. If anything, it will be much worse than usual.

Protestations about the new committee being a modern version of the Church Committee notwithstanding -- the only thing the new committee has in common is the use of the word committee -- we can see what's coming from a mile away. And, unfortunately, it's a well-worn playbook which has proven politically effective in the past.

Whether that's true again, only time will tell. But no sooner had the new Congress been seated than the Biden Administration handed their opponents a golden hand grenade. 

Docudrama 

By now, virtually everyone who is paying the least bit of attention has heard about the Obama-era classified documents found in an office previously used by President Biden at the University of Pennsylvania and in his garage at home. We don't know what the documents actually were, or how highly classified they are; most reports refer to them as "bearing classification markings."

But they're clearly sensitive materials which should not have been in Biden's possession after he left office as vice president in January 2017. And given the potential legal ramifications, Attorney General Garland did the only prudent thing in the current political climate and appointed a special counsel to look into the matter.

Of course, the current political climate is what it is thanks to former president Trump's own issues with handling classified materials. But no matter. It didn't take long for the pundits on the right to jump on the news, or for the Republicans in the House to leap into action and -- unsurprisingly -- demand information about an ongoing investigation. 

Leaving aside the fact Article I of the Constitution doesn't exactly make probes of the executive branch the first priority of Congress (oversight isn't even mentioned), there are important differences between the two cases. The most obvious one is intent. Where public information and his own public admissions make it clear Trump knew he had classified materials and refused to give them back when he should have, Biden's attorneys immediately reported the presence of the documents to the relevant authorities. 

Which would, of course, make it unnecessary for the FBI to "raid" Biden's home, since he wasn't hiding anything. In fact, the National Archives didn't even know the documents were missing, and no one in the government was looking for them.

But such nuance isn't the strong suit of the MAGA-driven right, as it never is for extremists of any stripe. Unfortunately, the inability to make important distinctions isn't limited to just extremists, who may be doing it on purpose anyway. In our information-saturated society it's becoming a more and more prominent feature of our public discourse.

In many ways, we're in an epistemic crisis -- experiencing a general failure to think clearly about important matters objectively. Too many people reject verifiable facts while embracing some of the most outlandish conspiracy theories. And even those who are willing to accept factual information too often can't process it in an orderly manner.

In a recent article, esteemed Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker examined the issue. It's an important read and well worth your time (if you get a sign in prompt, just click on "continue reading"): Reason To Believe - by Steven Pinker - Persuasion 

It's not just an academic argument. During the height of the Covid-19 crisis, disinformation about vaccines and the disease itself was far too easily disseminated and accepted. It's still happening. The same thing can be said about any number of important social issues, whether we're talking about, say, firearms regulation (where the left fails to make the important distinctions) or the Biden and Trump documents cases (where the failure is on the right).

In a famous opinion in a capital punishment case, Justice Potter Stewart pointed out it's equally arbitrary and capricious to treat two similar things differently, or two different things the same. For us as citizens in a representative democracy, being able to tell the difference matters a great deal. We can't make reasoned judgments without the use of reason.

What's worse, once myths take hold they become a narrative. From there it's a short step to treating everything as a show, including our politics. Government becomes theater. It's not a healthy way for us to conduct our self-governance. It's not a balanced way for us to lead our lives.

Whether there's an ultimate solution is an unknown. It's certainly nothing new. Surely, every society and every culture has been comprised of people with a wide variety of cognitive abilities (and it has nothing to do with intelligence -- smart people don't always think straight, either). There's always going to be a baseline of confusion, to coin a phrase.

But where that confusion makes it difficult for us to see through the haze, the consequences can be nothing short of deadly. And for proof, we only need to look to Europe.

Putin on the Blitz 

As the War in Ukraine continues its relentless grind in the Donbas, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin seems determined to replicate the mistakes of previous dictators caught in a similar predicament. Having failed to conquer his neighboring country on his first try, and with his military seemingly unable to organize itself effectively, Putin has resorted to inflicting as much damage as he can on the civilian population.

His main target has been Ukraine's energy infrastructure. Clearly, the relentless bombardment is at least in part an attempt to break the will of the Ukrainians to fight on by freezing them out: knock out the power and you knock out the heat. And the winters in Ukraine are nothing if not brutally cold.

It's a strategy not without a certain brutal logic. After all, people can only take so much. And by constantly assaulting Ukraine from the air, Putin forces his prey to expend their defensive bullets, shells and missiles. If he times it right, he can mount a spring offensive between the time when the Ukrainians are close to running out of ammunition and the time when the flow of Western military aid becomes decisive.

And make no mistake, that aid will be decisive. Putin surely knows it too, regardless of any public bravado. Ukraine has so far fended him off largely thanks to their Soviet-era stockpile of weaponry, with the addition of largely American defensive systems. But now NATO offensive weapons, including both infantry fighting vehicles and heavy armor, are about to start making their way to the front.

Which gives the Russian tyrant an obvious incentive to limit the supply of Western arms to the Ukrainians as much as he possibly can. Since interdicting the supply routes is out of the question -- he'd have to attack NATO territory to do that, and then all bets are off -- his goal is to close the spigot at the source.

And his method is the tried-and-true tool of disinformation: Russia’s Top Five Persistent Disinformation Narratives - United States Department of State

Which brings us back to our epistemic crisis. Some members of Congress, for whatever reason, are threatening to limit or even end aid to Ukraine. Frequently, they use the term "blank check" to describe the aid, creating the impression the United States is just throwing arms and equipment the Ukrainians' way without any oversight or control. 

In right-wing media, some of the most popular pundits (who are disinformation machines in their own right) go so far as to unabashedly parrot the Kremlin's propaganda line. In their telling, Russia may even be justified in their invasion (one of the Kremlin's key talking points maintains the "special military operation" is to reclaim traditionally Russian territory from a "nazified" Ukraine).

The only real defense against this kind of bunkum is critical thinking based on the knowledge of accurate information. In the case of Congress, all the appropriations are authorized by Congress itself. They are the oversight. One would think a sitting member of Congress would themselves understand that, which begs the question of whether saying otherwise is ignorance or intentional, but often that's a question for the voters to ultimately decide.

In the case of the pundits, an understanding of history is necessary to debunk the more outlandish claims. For one thing, using ethnic unity as an excuse for invading a sovereign country is (ironically) straight out of the Nazi playbook; it's the very justification Hitler used for conquering Czechoslovakia in the runup to World War II. Most citizens should have learned that in high school. 

The question of Ukrainian history is a more complicated one. But even there, just a passing effort at research using legitimate sources -- identifying which are legitimate likewise depends on critical thinking skills -- would show Ukraine as we know it today was a socio-cultural entity before Moscow even existed. And deeper dives are available, often for free, as in this excellent video course courtesy of Timothy Snyder: The Making of Modern Ukraine: A Free Online Course from Yale University, Featuring 23 Lectures | Open Culture 

All of which requires some effort, of course. We'll discuss the question of laziness some other time. For now, it's enough to know we can do better, and quite easily, if we truly want to. Given the suffering of the Ukrainians and the stakes involved for ourselves in the face of a European war of conquest, it doesn't seem too much of an ask that we try. 

Odds and Ends 

While we're on the subject of Ukraine, a couple weeks ago President Zelenskyy sat down for an interview with David Letterman in Kyiv. It's quite a remarkable conversation and worth 45 minutes of your time: My Next Guest with David Letterman and Volodymyr Zelenskyy | Full Episode | Netflix - YouTube 

The Pentagon has begun the process of changing the names of varies facilities from those honoring Confederate leaders. And it's not as easy a job as many think: Get Ready for Fort Liberty: The Pentagon Begins Changing Confederate Base Names | Military.com 

The James Webb Space Telescope continues to discover some amazing things in the Universe. This time, it's a planet which looks at least similar to Earth in some important ways (let's hope we don't need it for a lifeboat): NASA’s James Webb telescope discovers its first Earth-sized exoplanet - The Verge 

And finally, some translators managed to give new meaning to the old phrase, "good enough for government work": FEMA fires group for nonsensical Alaska Native translations | AP News 

See you next week.

Kevin J. Rogers is the executive director of the Modern Whig Institute. He can be reached at director@modernwhig.org. When not engaged with the Institute he publishes independently to Commentatio on Substack. ___________________________________________________________

The Modern Whig Institute is a 501(c)(3) civic research and education foundation dedicated to the fundamental American principles of representative government, ordered liberty, capitalism, due process and the rule of law.

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