‘Consider This Hypothetical’
Hey rube! Here’s Andrew Sullivan in July of 2007, as spotted by Jim Geraghty today:
Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.
Related: “If we’re so concerned about hurting the feelings of Muslims,” Rush asks today, “then why is Obama bragging that he killed Osama so often?” As spotted by Kathy Shaidle, now celebrating her 12th (!) year of blogging.
More: Shock video: “The movie that enraged Islamic extremists all over the world.” This shock footage can’t be helping matters, either.
Idiot.
Well, propaganda is best when it is a fantasy. For it to work, you have to tell people something they are going to want to believe.
Boy, these people never get tired of being wrong, do they? Their ideas are so consistently wrong, we’d be much better off by simply using the Costanza method and doing the exact opposite of anything they say.
“ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm”
To say something moves on a logarithmic scale is to say it does almost nothing at all: log(10)=1, log(100)=2, log(1000)=3, log(10 billion)=10. In other words, it takes an order of magnitude of change to ratchet things up even a single notch.
Recent events prove Sullivan’s mathematically incompetent logarithmic calculus to be exactly right.