A couple of days ago, Erick Erickson tried to look angry at Vice President Kamala Harris (D-CA):
Also, shame on the current Vice President.
Unless Kamala Harris can show us videos of people jumping to their deaths from the Capitol Dome to escape the mob, she needs to shut the hell up instead of comparing January 6th to September 11th. What a ridiculous and shameful thing to say. But I’m sure she doesn’t care, which makes it even worse.
The first red flag was the context of his anger, which is a post reprimanding Republicans and right wing extremists who might be angry at former Vice President Dick Cheney (R-WY), who served in the Bush II Administration, and happens to be the father of Rep Liz Cheney (R-WY). This slam of the Vice President was tacked on to the end.
Why is this important? Because Erickson is trying to stay relevant to the conservative base, and by criticizing a base angry at the former vice president, he’s running a risk. This is risk-mitigation, where he invokes conservative base anger and derision and throws it at Vice President Harris.
And don’t forget the ridicule. That’s the second red flag for me. Ridicule of someone for stupidity, who just happens to have a reputation for being really smart, is a good, but not infallible, red flag.
Erickson didn’t provide a link, but, if she did say anything applicable, I think there’s not much question of what it would be, given Erickson’s description. So does it make sense to compare the 9/11 Tragedy and the January 6th insurrection?
There’s potentially more to an incident than just counting bodies or dollars; that is, metrics, as always, matter. So what’s the proper metric here?
Incidents in the past function as indications of what may happen in the future. To pick out an astronomical example, the telescopic and radar watch for Near Earth Orbit (NEO) objects is motivated, in large part, by the Tunguska event of 1908. This immense air blast over a fortunately sparsely populated area of Siberia has been a topic of speculation for decades, and one of the better theories is that a huge meteor entered the Earth’s atmosphere and blew up in mid-air over Siberia. If we want to prevent having this event replicated over, say, New York City, the first step is to detect an incoming object, and then do something about it, two projects that remain under development.
What you are motivates metric selection. Insurance companies count the dollars in sometimes-stomach turning detail[1], first responders count bodies. What do leaders such as VP Harris and Cheney do?
They worry about tomorrow. What’s the risk of this happening again? is what they should be asking. Measuring existential risk, and mitigating it, is their job.
And here’s the thing: for all of the nightmarish horror of 9/11, future risk is not that big a deal for 9/11. Only a few extremists were involved, who took advantage of a very lax security system. We have since tightened security, closed loop holes, and hunted down the criminals responsible. There have been no more incidents.
The insurrection: How do we assess the risk? We can compare personnel: a collection of foreign nationals for 9/11, compared to several hundred Americans, people who should know better than to believe the “Big Lie” of widespread electoral fraud, who invaded the Capitol building, chanted intimidating slogans, set up an executioner’s stand, and vandalized parts of the Capitol building.
Motivation is important, too, as most foreign nationals with access to the America have no interest in inflicting violence on us. Meanwhile, members of one of the two major American political parties continue to believe, to an unsettling extent, that electoral fraud occurred in the 2020 election, despite a complete and utter lack of evidence.
Leaders? The 9/11 leader is dead. The insurrection leaders are not, and some are still free, although the Department of Justice is working on that problem.
And was 9/11 an existential threat? Not in the least. It was clever, but not backed by sufficient resources to endanger the entire country, and there hasn’t been another attack like it in 20 years, and those who are thought to be in sympathy with it find themselves dead or pinned down, thanks to the combined efforts of Republican and Democratic Administrations, otherwise known as American Administrations.
Meanwhile, simply getting Republican leaders to admit that Biden won in 2020, fair and square, is like pulling teeth out of a five year old: kicking, screaming, denying, head-shaking, and NO NO NO NO! is all de rigeur. Each one of these “leaders” is a potential leader, although the former President doesn’t tolerate dissent, nor wannabes jockeying for position. And 20%, maybe, of the conservative base thinks it’s been cheated.
Perhaps most frighteningly, without evidence. This lack of rationality is perhaps the most frightening: they have no idea how to assess reality or predict the future.
In essence, once the metric changes from counting dollars or nightmares to existential risk, all of a sudden VP Harris suddenly appears a lot more credible than Erickson is willing to give credit.
Does Erickson realize all this? Is he a hypocrite simply simply trying to keep his audience happy, to reassure them that disbelieving the 2020 results is really acceptable, by slamming a Vice President who has to sit the hot-seat, moreso than many others have because of the age of the President? Or does Erickson really believe that measuring a tragedy stops with the body count?
Beats me. But I don’t think it does. This is all about “Fool me one, shame on you. Fool me twice … we’re all dead.”
1 I once worked for a word-processing company, and in order to report bugs our customers would submit documents to show how our print subsystem didn’t work. Some of these documents came from personal injury attorney firms, and reading those documents could be a hair-raising experience.
