A Sneer is Not an Argument

 Trump officials are always very proud of their crude aggressiveness in interviews. 

Pam Bondi gave a disgraceful performance on Capitol Hill last week. When she was grilled about the Epstein case or whatever it was, she responded by calling Jamie Raskin a "washed-up loser lawyer." 

I imagine she considered this a great rhetorical victory. 

Likewise, Tricia McLaughlin—the departing spokeswoman for DHS—celebrated the end of her brief and pathetic career as a mouthpiece for a police state by recirculating footage of a TV interview in which she said she would be willing to spend "all day" smearing the reputation of a Maryland father of three whom her boss wrongfully deported to a torture-prison in El Salvador. 

Apparently, she was proud of this performance. 

They all are. They're thrilled by their own little lies and smears and insults. They show them off like they expect to be congratulated for them—"as though / The abounding gutter had been Helicon / Or calumny a song," as Yeats once put it. 

But they have all confused being angry, crude, and aggressive with making a point. They are like the second Jehovah in Bernard Shaw's Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God—the Jehovah of the Book of Job, who thinks he has won his argument because he has raised his voice and badgered Job into silence. 

After flexing his power and bragging about all his amazing works, this Jehovah (just like the one in the Book of Job), demands to know "What have you to say to that argument?" 

To which Shaw's protagonist replies: "It isn't an argument: it's a sneer. [...] You don't seem to know what an argument is." 

As Shaw adds in his own afterword to the tale, in speaking of Job's God: "He is a very bad debater, unless indeed we give him credit for deliberately saving himself from defeat by the old expedient: 'No case: abuse the plaintiff's attorney.'"

Abuse the attorney by calling him a "washed-up loser lawyer," perhaps? Bondi appears to have learned her Sunday School lessons well. 

But there is no substance behind the argument. Simply declaring that you made Leviathan and formed the world is no answer to what the Black Girl wishes to know: "why you did not make the world all good instead of a mixture of good and bad." 

Jehovah, for all his "death and thunder," then—as Heine put it—cannot actually win the argument without resort to an ad hominem. 

And neither can this administration. They have no case. And they know it.