Could it be? That Shooter042 has stumbled into creating a teachable moment?

Not for himself, of course. But others gathered here:

Guilt by association or just an Ad Hominen?

Glenn: Fairness compels me to concede that Cockburn never worked for far-right, pro-war Republican politicians from Kansas -- and I doubt he considers Glenn Reynolds his "blog-father" and Michelle Malkin's minions his "friends" -- so his credentials as a war reporter are obviously suspect. That just goes without saying.

Given Glenn's extensive use of guilt by association, Patrick Cockburn is not believable. He is the son of notorious communist sympathizer Claud Cockburn and brother of notorious liberal writer Alexander Cockburn. Obviously then, he can be neither competent nor credible.

It's always hard to be 100% sure what Shooter is talking about. Heh.

But the implication here seems to be that the quoted passage constitutes guilt by association. In this regard, two points need to be made:

(1) Satirizing the inverse of guilt by association does not constitute guilt by association.

(2) Like almost all fallacies, guilt by association is a rigid perversion of a valid hueristic impulse. Generally speaking, birds of a feather do flock together, and therefore if someone is part of crowd that has engaged in some sort of disreputable, or even illegal behavior then there's a good probabilistic foundation for heightened suspicion. However, it's also true that folks who are most intimately exposed to corruption are often the most vigorously opposed to it. So it's extremely unfair to judge someone simply on the basis of association. Which is why, in the legal realm, suspicion may be cause enough to investigate, but suspicion alone won't get you a warrant, much less a conviction. (Unless, of course, the suspect is black.)

This second point sets us up nicely for the Comsymps and Coburns part my subject line promised.

"Communist sympathizer" ("Comsymp" for short) is an inherently slanderous term because of how it has historically been used. There are all sorts of possible meaninigs to the assertion that someone is a "Communist sympathizer." One could sympathize with Marx's concern about the brutal savagery of 19th Century capitalism. Or, on the other extreme, one could be a "loyal Bushie"-style apologist for every Stalinist atrocity ever committed. Conceptually, it's about as a muddy as a term can get.

But historically, it's been repeatedly used specifically for purposes of imputing guilt by association, and for effectively erasing the very reasons that different sorts of people are not Communists, though they may share some sympathetic attitudes or ideas in common. Thus, someone who is democratic socialist, or an anarcho-syndicalist or a social democrat is not recognized and addressed in terms of what they do believe and are prepared to defend, but in terms of something that they do not.

This is the most rank form of intellectual dishonesty, and it has been the bread-and-butter of the right wing for well over 100 years. Now, with the fading of Communism and the emergence of religious terrorism, a new framework for the same old game is being launched. It's a lot harder going, since the ones launching it are objectively so much closer to the religious terrorists than the people they're attacking. But they have lots of practice in just making shit up, so it's not a problem, really.

Now, about those Cockburns.

First off, there's a lot of them. Second, they're all different. Heck, some of them (Claud's granddaughter, Laura Flanders, for example) aren't even named Cockburn. And that's pretty much par for the course when it comes to writers, even when they pretty much stay clumped around journalism as their primary focus: Writing is a marvelous way for people who are close to one another to both agree and disagree at the same time.

Heck, for that matter, writing is marvelous way for people to both agree and disagree with themselves at the same time.

But you can, at least form general ideas of what folks are like. Alexander is most himself, one might argue, as a controversialist, while Andrew and Patrick are more of the conventional reporting-based sort. Alexander is very good at stirring things up, and often bringing things to light that you might not have thought of or heard about before. This makes him a very good editor, as anyone who's read Counterpunch can appreciate.

But someone who plays this role is bound to get things wrong sometimes. It's their job to get things wrong, because without taking risks and sticking their necks out, they will never saying anything very interesting or important.

This is not to say that Alexander always plays this role. He plays many roles. But his most characteristic one is that of pushing ideas, arguments, perspectives, new information (not yet integrated and nicely balanced out). And when he is fulfilling that role, he should be judged by what makes that role work.

Andrew and Patrick, of course, are quite different people, each with their own careers.

And since Patrick's reporting is what got all this started, it's worth looking at what wikipedia has to say about that:

His most recent book, following award-winning reporting from Iraq, is "The Occupation" published by Verso Books. Mixing first hand accounts with reporting, Cockburn's book is critical of the invasion as well as the Salafi fundamentalists who comprise much of the resistance. "The Occupation" has been nominated for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle award for nonfiction.

Yeah, those Commie National Book Critics!

L.W.M.--

In Los Angeles, I headed up a local FAIR chapter's monitoring of the Iraq War coverage on KCRW, the "hip" Westside NPR station. So I got to study it on the ground level, so to speak.

It was not a pretty sight.