Vincent J. Curtis
2 Apr 2017
If you’re like me, watching Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace has become really tedious since
the election of Donald Trump. Wallace
keeps pushing the view that the sky is falling under Trump. It is not hard to perceive Wallace’s liberal
biases in operation.
This Sunday’s episode was no exception. It started with the interview of new EPA
Director Scott Pruitt, and the first question out of Wallace’s mouth put my
finger over the mute button. Two
sentences into the answer Pruitt gave to that question, the mute button went on
and stayed on for the rest of the interview.
Wallace had pulled a classic debating trick, and Pruitt fell for
it. The transcript of the interview
shows Wallace pulling the same trick three times, and Pruitt falling for it all
three times.
The trick is a variation of arguing from authority. Wallace would quote the opinion of some
alleged expert, and then demand an answer concerning the consequences of that opinion. When used effectively, both the interviewee
and the audience are overwhelmed – the interviewee is thrown onto a
disadvantaged defensive, and there is no easy escape. The logically proper thing for Wallace to
have done, however, is get the interviewee to agree with the opinion of the
alleged expert, and then to demand an answer to a question concerning the
consequences of that opinion that the interviewee just agreed to.
This is how the interview between Wallace and Pruitt roughly
went:
WALLACE: When the Obama EPA announced its Clean Power
Plan, it said that the reduction in carbon pollution would have the following
health benefits.
By
2030, it said there would be 90,000 fewer asthma attacks a year, 300,000 fewer
missed work and school days, and 3,600 fewer premature deaths a year.
Without
the Clean Power Plan, how are you going to prevent those terrible things?
Unfortunately, Scott Pruitt did not begin his answer with a
variation of, “You don’t believe that crap, do you Chris?” In the first place, it is the Obama EPA and we all know how
ideological it was. They don’t believe
in an absolute thing called, “Truth” what those relativists believed in was
what they could get you to believe. Second,
there is a loophole in that description big enough to drive a truck through. It is the word, “premature.” No statistical study can be worth anything
with an arbitrary term like “premature” in it.
A healthy 85 year old man hit by a car can be said to have died “prematurely.” What constitutes a ‘premature’ death is a
matter of opinion, and you can’t base a statistical study on that kind of
opinion. Lastly, ‘air pollution’ – let’s
face it - is not a known cause of death, and so can’t be the cause of a “premature”
death.
Pruitt did not give an answer like that, and this gave
Wallace an opportunity to counter with another argument from authority:
WALLACE:
But, sir, you're giving me a regulatory answer, a political answer. You’re not
giving me a health answer. I talked about 90,000 fewer asthma attacks, 300,000
fewer missed days in school and work.
The
Obama Clean Power Plan called -- said that carbon pollution from the power
sector would be reduced by 30 percent. It would be one-third lower than it was
in 2005.
Here's
what the American Lung Association says, "Half of all Americans now live
in counties with unhealthy air." You talk about all the regulatory
overreach, but the question is, there are 166 million people living in unclean
air and you are going to remove some of the pollution restrictions, which will
make the air even worse.
Pruitt again failed to notice the
assumption that Wallace was positing, that half of all Americans now live in
counties with unhealthy air, according to the American Lung Association. Therefore, he failed to counter Wallace by
challenging the premise, and got beaten up as he was running around looking for
cover. The obvious challenge to make of
Wallace was to ask what was meant by “unhealthy air?” If the air is unhealthy, how is it that so
many people are living so well in it?
Lifespan in America is getting longer and longer, and it doesn’t make sense
to me that that could be happening if so many people were breathing “unhealthy
air.” I admire the Lung Association, but
I think in this case their closeness to their issue is clouding their
judgement.
Wallace would have been flummoxed
because his premise was not just denied, but overthrown. The weakness of arguing from authority, as
Wallace did throughout this interview, is it is vulnerable to an attack on the
objectivity of the authority, for that destroys the argument being made.
This is the third use of the trick of arguing from authority
that Wallace employed in his interview of Scott Pruitt:
WALLACE: You had a famous exchange a couple of months
ago -- actually last month that I would like to play right now.
JOE
KERNER, CNBC ANCHOR: Do you believe that it's been proven that CO2 is the
primary control knob for climate? Do you believe that?
PRUITT:
No, I would not agree that it's the primary contributor to the global warming
that we’re seeing.
WALLACE:
Mr. Pruitt, there are all kinds of studies that contradict you. The U.N.’s
panel on climate change says it is at least 95 percent likely that more than
half the temperature increase since the mid-20th century is due to human
activities. NOAA, that’s our own, National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, says there's more carbon dioxide now than in the last 400,000
years, and NOAA says 2015 and 2016 are the two hottest years on record.
Mr.
Pruitt, are we supposed to believe that that's all a coincidence?
Having been rehearsed through the arguments many times
before through challenging Obama’s EPA in the courts, Mr. Pruitt ought
to have had a good riposte at hand. He
did not, and the audience was witness to the spectacle of Chris Wallace beating
Scott Pruitt all about the head with a stick, and Pruitt not knowing what to do
about it.
The proper method of defeating Wallace’s arguing from
authority and then challenging on the basis of that authority, is to
dispute the authority! What Pruitt
should have started was with a logical truth: that correlation is not
causation. Just because A and B occur
together, does not mean that A causes B.
Secondly, it simply isn’t so that 2015 and 2016 are the
hottest on record. The NOAA reaches that
conclusion by statistical manipulation that many objective observers regard as fraudulent. If you the lower the temperature record for
1928 by half a degree, as the NOAA did last year, you can make the temperature
for 2015 look hotter and on an upward trend.
The world has experienced ice ages and temperatures as much as six
degrees hotter than it is now, and man had nothing to do with it. We simply do not know the contribution, if
any, man makes to global warming because the issue of climate change has become
so politicized that people like Dr. Judith Curry has been driven out of the
field by harassment because her views are not in accord with the power brokers.
In answering like that, Scott Pruitt would have demonstrated
a mastery of the subject that Wallace could not have assailed. And Pruitt ought to have been rehearsed in
these arguments because of his involvement in lawsuits against the Obama EPA on
this very matter.
Wallace beat on Pruitt one last time with a logical fallacy
that Pruitt failed to notice. It went as
follows:
WALLACE:
Let me ask you one -- let me ask you one's last question, and again I
apologize, sir. Because it goes to the whole question of commitment to trying
to improve the environment. Under the president's new budget, the EPA is cut 31
percent, that is more than any other agency.
And I
want to put up some of the cuts that are included in the president's budget.
Here are some of the 56 programs that would be scrapped: Great Lakes
restoration, water runoff control for farmers, pesticide safety.
What
does that say about the commitment of this administration and you to cleaning
up the environment when you're making a 31 percent cut in your agency and
cutting things like that, water runoffs for farmers?
Here Wallace is equating commitment with money. Pruitt had two ways of replying, and he chose
neither, resulting in another beating from Wallace. One way was to ask Wallace what success
looked like? It looked like less need
for money. Pruitt could have said that we
are making great progress and less is needed from America’s hard pressed taxpayers
to deal with the matters. A second line
of proceeding is even better, and plays into the known ideological excesses of
the Obama administration. It was to observe
that pay for bureaucrats is not a measure of success of a program. The Trump administration is committed to
these goals, but it is simply wrong to equate our level of commitment to our
willingness to pay for needless bureaucrats and regulators. Full Stop.
Look at Wallace.
Wallace could only sputter at a reply like the latter.
Chris Wallace three times used argument from authority in a
vicious manner characteristic of the left-wing.
It is indefensible, in my view, that Scott Pruitt three times fell for
it in an area that ought to be in his realm of expertise. As someone with a long history in politics, Pruitt
ought to be well-verse in the vicious debating trick Wallace use on him. Yet, he did not.
The GOP is not called the party of stupid for nothing. Democrats challenge premises as a matter of routine; so much so that it is not worthwhile to listen to them.
For his part, Wallace’s liberal biases are
making watching FNS too much like
watching Rachael Madcow.
-30-
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