Silly Season

David Frum describes the experience of witnessing Mitt Romney answer some tough foreign policy questions:

Mitt Romney has an amazingly orderly mind and an impressive grasp of detail. He also has a serious Garbage In/Garbage Out problem - that is, while his mind processes information in a lucid and logical way, his intake valves lack filters for screening out nonsense. The overwhelming impression that I took away from his presentation was that it was ... silly.

I don't actually understand this metaphor. If Romney's mind is so sharp, so lucid and logical, then how come he can't catch the nonsense? Meanwhile, Frum also tells us that Rudy Giuliani "skips lightly over crucial details" and has ideas that "are much less worked through than Romney's" but on the plus side "the spirit behind them is exactly right." At this point, Frum (with Giuliani in tow) departs planet reality. "As he said: the mullahs released the hostages in 1981 because they looked into Ronald Reagan's eyes and saw something they did not see in Jimmy Carter's. I saw that same something in Guiliani's." Okay, sure. Lessons learned: Romney is silly, whereas Giuliani will force terrorists to back down with his steely gaze and David Frum has no understanding of how international relations work or the history of US-Iranian relations.

Photo by Flickr user Editor B used under a Creative Commons license

Comments

> I don't actually understand this metaphor. If
> Romney's mind is so sharp, so lucid and logical,
> then how come he can't catch the nonsense?

If you have ever dealt with the Utah software industry you understand how this works. Utah produces a lot of smart and very well-educated people. But once they move outside well-defined technical realms their smartness and eduction... starts to interact with the world in weird ways. Almost as if they are isolated and insulated from the real world with its diversity, complexity, and ambiguity - and can only see things through a specific set of filters. When those filters are overwhelmed or bypassed some very odd results occur.

MWNN

Posted by Man With No Name | June 29, 2007 11:54 AM

But the mullahs did see something in Reagan's eyes. They looked upon his gaze and said, "okay, okay, we'll keep up our end of the deal." I gather what Giuliani means is that he wants to violate U.N. sanctions against Iran and sell them nukes, then use the proceeds to fund a campaign of systematic rape and torture of civilians in Central America.

Posted by MSB | June 29, 2007 12:02 PM

Seems to me there's a pretty good chance that within a few years Frum and all his friends may be looking into the "steely gaze" of their very heavily tattooed cellmates and seeing...something which they don't particularly like...

Posted by RKU | June 29, 2007 12:06 PM

What's the point of putting up photos that have some sort of very vague relation to the post? (Rommeny has a Garbage-in-garbage out problem, so you put up a picture of garbage?) I can't see that it adds anything and looks crappy. Is it just to show us you spend time on flicker?

Posted by Matt (not the famous one) | June 29, 2007 12:11 PM

I think I do understand the Romney metaphor. He is the prototypical corporate mouthpiece, able to easily allay peoples' concerns and present the unnecessary and useless antidote to their woes--much like a salesman does with a product. It should come as no surprise that Romney has a background in consulting--he worked for the Boston Consulting Group--the ultimate business for charlatan's of this sort. Hence the powerpoint presentation on terrorism.

Posted by Jeff | June 29, 2007 12:15 PM

Iranians looked into Reagan's eyes and thought "we can trade arms for hostages with this guy".

Why do sane people treat David Frum as a serious thinker?

I think there is such a shortage of intelligent people among conservative pundits that the MSM is desperate to find someone who is not as unhinged as Coulter/Goldberg/Limbaugh. If they can find a conservative who doesn't advocate violence against people he has political disagreements with or spew racist comments they declare him/her "serious" and give them op-ed space.

It is the bigotry of low expectations. Coulterized Conservatives have lowered the bar so much that they have made the David Frums look like philosophers.

Posted by DonB | June 29, 2007 12:15 PM

Yes, they looked into Reagan's steely gaze and said "here's a man that will sell us missiles!"

Posted by DukeJ | June 29, 2007 12:17 PM

I also want to have a discussion about your choice of picture to use with your post rather than discuss the contents of your post.

Posted by jg | June 29, 2007 12:21 PM

If you want hours of entertainment tell a wingnut that Iran released the hostages as part of an arms deal and not because of the size of Ronny's sack. Its even more fun than telling them the fall of the Soviet Union had more to do with Gorby than Ron.

Posted by jg | June 29, 2007 12:24 PM

relative to mitt, i'm reminded of a story i've told before. long ago and far away, in the late '60s, when i was a teenager, i was watching firing line with my mother one night.

"boy that bill buckley is smart," she said (and she is a serious liberal). "no mom," i replied, "he's articulate. if he were smart, he wouldn't say so many dumb things."

Posted by howard | June 29, 2007 12:32 PM

Back in 2000, Al Gore TOLD US in the Presidential Debates that Bush was LYING to us -- that his budget numbers did not add up when you included Bush's tax cut.

Isn't Frum in the same crowd that nodded approvingly when Bush dismissed Gore's criticism as "Fuzzy Math"?

Well, after 8 years of Bush, we are $4 TRILLION deeper in debt. That's not fuzzy.

Maybe Frum can explain to us how Bush was running a surplus --before he ran a deficit.

WHY do we tolerate these lying creeps?

Posted by Don Williams | June 29, 2007 12:54 PM

Talk about your garbage in - you brought in David Frum.

"They looked in Reagan eyes?"

Is that why theey funded the Lebanese "terrorists" that blew up the 273 Marines in Beirut? Is that why Reagan "caved" and removed the Marines from Beirut?

Frum is a lying idiot.

Posted by Armando | June 29, 2007 1:15 PM

Logic is a value-free system. There is no contradiction between a capacity for logic and a tolerance for garbage. Most people chose the inputs to their 'logic algorithms' based on emotional appeal, or in the case of more sophisticated individuals, they chose the inputs to produce emotionally satisfying outputs, without worrying about whether or not the product at either end makes any sense, even on its own terms.

Posted by Rlaing | June 29, 2007 1:40 PM

isn't that a picture of a New Orleans street? and what does it have to do with this post?

Posted by sean | June 29, 2007 1:58 PM

What's the point of putting up photos that have some sort of very vague relation to the post?

Why do you think a photo of Romney's brain has only a very vague relation tothe post?

Posted by rea | June 29, 2007 2:00 PM

RKU,

What makes you think they won't like what they see? If they are typical wingers, it may be just what they have wanted for oh so long.

And Reagan the Man of Steel meme. Yes, brave, brave, Sir Ronnie, boldly ran away. Where did Reagan ever stand up and get counted. Oh yeah, Grenada. That took huge sack. The bold stand in Beirut was quite impressive too.

(Actually, I credit him for having the sense to cut and run from that debacle. Would that Bush had enough sense to do the same.)

Posted by Klein's Tiny Left Nut | June 29, 2007 5:53 PM

Is everyone once again confusing the Tehran embassy hostages with the later arms for hostages deal? That's always annoying. The two aren't related.

The release of the embassy hostages was negotiated by Carter, and the agreement by which the Iranians agreed to do so was signed on January 19, before Reagan's inauguration. The Iranians, who by that point hated Carter, then waited until six minutes after Reagan's inaguration to actually release the hostages, but it had little to do with Reagan's steely resolve. (And that's ignoring the whole October Surprise possibility, which seems, at the very least, quite plausible).

What a load of bollocks.

Posted by John | June 29, 2007 7:09 PM

this is also a perfect example of one of the worst tendencies of political reporting: psychobabble. usually, it's strict freudian or some bastardized developmental psychobabble. but this is the first example of cognitive psychobabble that i've seen.

of course frum has not examined romney's cognitive function or patterns, nor would he be qualified to do so... so why does he get to talk like he's an expert?

Posted by David | June 30, 2007 1:30 AM