If you were concerned or threatened about the powers being isolated in the executive during the Bush administration and the secrecy involved in wielding those powers, then I am right there with you. (I’m still there, having seen little out of Obama’s administration and the newly-dominant Democrats to ease my mind. This EFF press release pretty well illustrates the continuity of the civil liberties crisis under Obama, and the Obama DoJ’s tight relationship with the RIAA and about-face on military commissions for Gitmo detainees isn’t helping my confidence any.)

If your statements or thinking about politics were probabilistic, then your beliefs aren’t subject to being disproved (although the one experimental data point is against your statements/thinking), and so discussing whether or not they’re “reasonable” is rather pointless¹. Since this is reality and not some random dice game, it’d be nice if probabilistic statements that turned out to be false could account for their failures, and anyone who made a probabilistic statement that turned out to be false and then accounts for that failure substantially raises their credit in my books. However, I realize that in this world of Realpolitik the key point of probabilistic statements is the ability for people to throw them around without being held accountable for their wrongness later, and so I don’t expect much.

The important part in all of this is that we give credit where credit is due: to those who foresaw what actually occurred. Similarly, we should treat with increased cynicism those sources of information and hype which predicted things that turned out to be false. And if we became wrapped up in a paradigm which brought us to expect a future that never came to pass, we should be particularly concerned — after all, these people were capable of taking us for a ride and alienating our expectations from the impending reality.

¹ Given conversations about a known past event, it is reasonable to believe the known past event happened and unreasonable to believe the known past event didn’t. Bush left the most office in the world with civility and peace, despite Bush’s successor having run a campaign based largely on capitalizing on Bush’s failures. That’s a known past event.

Eh… who said you were shrill or unhinged? You were the only one that said that, ironically kind of making it seem true.

Brian> “A question, though: what, short of the government coming around and throwing your ass into a concentration camp (which, I comment, we’ve already started constructing), would make you rethink your position? What possible crime could the Republicans commit to make you think “wait, this is not just those whiny liberal jerks with their Bush Derangement Syndrome, these are actually bad people”?”"

I would rethink my position, which was agreeing with the original post regarding “but that’s hardly reason to expect him to declare himself dictator” (and postponing the election/staying in office) if Bush had, in fact, declared himself a dictator and was still in office. I made no comment regarding whether these are good or bad people, please respond to actual posts, not your inner demons.

Robert, this goes for you too.