Betsy Newmark has been setting the low-tide mark of conservative thinking – and garnering honors for it – for some time. Today is no exception.

First there's this:

Does anyone else sense a similarity between the stories of the bombers in London and how no one seemed to know that they had these plans and the stories of the murderous youths at Columbine? Those kids had given off some hints that they were strange before, but no more so than many alienated loners in high school. And these guys in Britain gave off some signs of how deeply they had gotten into radical Islam, but probably no more so than hundreds of British Muslims. I just think it’s ironic that one group would murder kids and teachers at school out of what seemed a total lack of a belief system and these guys would murder commuters out of an extreme belief system.

Actually, I suspect that, in fact, nobody senses this – for the reason that few people are likely to sense "similarities" between things people don't know. (Though, to be fair, now that she's pointed it out, I do sense a similarity between the failures to anticipate two unremarkable disaffected white Christian kids in Colorado and four unremarkable radicalized political Muslims in London, as well as between them and the totally unanticipated mugging that's going to take place on the New York subway later today, the unexpected gang fight in New Delhi that will occur three weeks from now, and the shy, quiet loner who's going to suddenly shout obscenities at his elderly neighbor after sucking down too much cheap gin in an attempt to forget the girlfriend he stupidly let go, in Canberra, next April. Maybe they all suffer from the same lack of/extreme devotion to/somewhat puzzled state of/questioning in a sincere but uncommitted way/drunken belligerence about "belief systems" that characterizes the otherwise completely unrelated events Newmark mentions.)

As she notes, there was nothing in either case to indicate that the perpetrators of either the Columbine or the London attacks were a particularly unique threat before their acts – and certainly nothing to indicate "similarities" between them. Why she imagines anyone would "sense" anything based on what she herself explains is a lack of evidence connecting them is mind-boggling. More important, how "ironic" can it be that one attack came "out of" a "total lack of a belief system" and the other "out of" the completely opposite mindset? If your theory posits completely opposite and incompatible causes for events you regard as similar, your theory is wrong.

Apparently Newmark is groping to say that it is the lack of conservative Christianity that causes violence (or, caused it in two unrelated cases more than 6 years apart, on different continents, by perpetrators with completely different backgrounds and goals). The silliness of her "evidence" aside, that claim certainly falters in the face of years of murderous anti-abortion terrorism, Eric Rudolph, Lt. Gen. William "my God was bigger than his God" Boykin, George Bush, and a host of others. (Counter-evidence, for Christians, is conveniently no evidence at all – while no evidence at all is, for Newmark, the basis of "sensations" that justify whatever spin she wants to put on things.) But what tickles me about this post is not so much its nonsensical content as the sheer loopy obliviousness Newmark brings to it: unanticipatable events by completely unrelated individuals under completely dissimilar circumstances should prompt a "sensing" of similarity; both the lack of and extremism in a "belief system" create these similar events; no other type of, or attitude to, a "belief system" does so.

But in the inverted logic of the right, conclusions justify premises: any argument that produces the conclusion you want to hear is, ipso facto, a sound argument. This is what right-wing uber-blogger Hugh Hewitt calls "the real deal."

But that was just the beginning. Then there's this:

The Anchoress has some doubts about the British consulting firm that is paying Chelsea Clinton such a generous salary for a girl just out of grad school. And the firm is getting huge contracts from the Labour government without having to go through the bidding process. The Anchoress wonders when we will hear remarks of equivalency between Halliburton and this firm.

UPDATE: I've been informed that this is actually an American consulting firm and that Chelsea got that six-figure job straight out of undergraduate school. Amazing for an inexperienced young graduate, but reportedly not unusual for this firm.

To be sure, she cribbed it from The Anchoress, but that merely proves that neither of them can fact-check their way out of a paper bag. First, Anchoress posts, and Newmark quotes, a totally unsupported "suspicion" about Chelsea Clinton (is she fair game again? – why does the right wing hate her so much?). Then, a few little oopsies pop up in this three-sentence post: (1) It isn't a British firm; (2) She wasn't in grad school; (3) Her salary is normal for that firm. Sadly, we have some oopsie-oopsies as well: (1)(a) The firm is McKinsey & Co., one of the best known US management consulting firms in existence, and hardly an obscure reference. (2)(a) She was in grad school: she did her undergraduate work at Stanford and then did an earned M.Phil. in international relations at University College, Oxford – she was hired by McKinsey in her last year there, and started after finishing her degree. (2)(b) That fact was mentioned in the original article, which Newmark linked. (3)(a) Clinton is hardly an "inexperienced young graduate": in addition to her graduate degree, she has worked at the WHO in the area of expertise (healthcare policy) for which she is consulting with McKinsey – a fact that is also mentioned in the article. (3)(b) Just a question: what is "amazing" about something that is "not unusual"? Why is Newmark amazed by ordinary events? (4) The article Anchoress and Newmark base their falsehoods on documents no more than 2 million Pounds in no-bid contracts awarded under a short deadline (though it is true McKinsey has markedly increased its business after several former McKinseyites were hired by the Blair government). That's a lot of wrongness to pack into what started out as a totally unsourced three-sentence crib of someone else's Web site. And since – after parsing the falsehoods, the retractions, the falsehoods among the retractions, and the non-sequiturs – what it amounts to is "An American firm used its Labour-Party contacts to get UK business contracts under the normal award process while paying its normal salary to its well-educated employees," one is entitled to wonder what prompted this mess in the first place?

But what really got my attention, and thus resulted in my otherwise-unsolicited drenching by Newmark logic, was Newmark's drive-by kudo to Edward Whelan for his "clever" one-question test to determine "Are You An Originalist [Interpreter of the Constitution]?" It was actually Whelan that I wanted to comment on today, before I got sucked into the dark morass of Betsy's Page. But since Whelan's thinking is no better than Newmark's (and why would it be?), I'll stick it here. This, then, is what passes for "cleverness" on the right wing:

Q. The Constitution provides, as one of the criteria to be eligible to become president, that a person must be a "natural born Citizen" (or, alternatively, in a provision that long ago ceased to apply to any living persons, "a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution") How would you figure out what the phrase "natural born Citizen" means?

(A) You would determine that the "natural born Citizen" requirement, whatever it means, is obviously a relic of a benighted and xenophobic past, a past that "evolving standards of decency," as reflected in modern European electoral practices, requires be abandoned. It simply isn't fair, you would conclude, that any candidates should be excluded by such an arbitrary requirement from running for president. You would invoke "the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life" as you instead substituted your own arbitrary criteria for eligibility.

(B) You would try to discern the current meaning of the phrase "natural born Citizen." Its closest connection would appear to be to the concept of natural childbirth. Therefore, you would conclude that only those whose mothers did not use drugs during birth satisfy the requirement.

(C) You would look to literature as your guide. Macbeth finds great comfort in the promise that "none of woman born/Shall harm" him. But his comfort proves unwarranted when Macduff, who "was from his mother's womb/Untimely ripp'd," kills Macbeth. It follows that anyone whose birth was by Cesarean section is not a "natural born Citizen."

(D) You would try to determine the public meaning of the "natural born Citizen" requirement at the time that the Constitution was adopted.

If it is obvious to you that the proper response is (D), then you are an originalist. If you think that the answer might be (A), then you are probably Justice Stevens, O'Connor, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, or Breyer.

[He then includes the reference to a pre-Revolutionary European author that is apparently a holdover requirement from the William F. Buckley days.]

As a joke, it's lame, and as an argument, it's a joke. It's so hard to tell the difference at National Review Online.

What is startling is that Whelan seems to think he's actually on to something. He concludes his tour-de-force of cleverness with a claim that anyone who takes his test (and successfully avoids the alternatives that involve childbirth, Shakespeare plays, or "a benighted and xenophobic past... unfairness... arbitrary requirements... and arbitrary eligibility") will then "discover" that they are "originalists" – meaning virtually every right-thinking person in the US except a decisive majority of the US Supreme Court, whom he doesn't like, are "originalists" and thus... um, something. The challenge, as always, is to decide whether to take this nonsense seriously. (And let it be acknowledged that the National Review house style is perfectly shaded to place rational readers in an unresolvable dilemma: everything they write there is so stupid that you betray yourself as lacking a sense of humor by responding factually, while ignoring their nonsense gives them license to repeat it at intervals in the expectation that someone will eventually act on it. Buckley's proposal to forcibly tattoo homosexual men as a response to AIDS is the type specimen of this sort of behavior; Whelan is merely following the style guide.) Still, since history shows that they do take their own nonsense seriously whenever allowed to do so, I suppose a response is in order.

Leaving aside the ludicrous "test," Whelan's substantive points are as weak as might be imagined. He claims, first, that "originalism" is a new phrase because there had never previously been a need for naming it as a distinct form of Constitutional interpretation, inasmuch as there was never previously any alternative form. He likens it to the word "heterosexual," which was coined relatively recently, as he claims, "obviously not because heterosexuals did not previously exist, but rather precisely because what we now call heterosexuality had been widely understood to be normative." This is just plain bad thinking, though hardly surprising for that.

The fact that a certain type, or mode, or category is "normative" (i.e., is seen to be morally obligatory) has nothing to do with whether there is a word for it. ("Chastity" was "normative" at least as long as "heterosexuality" – but there was a word for it.) What makes a word necessary is that there is an alternative word with which to contrast it. It was because homosexuality was "the love that dare not speak its name" – a "crime" for which there literally was no word (it was commonly referred to as "unnatural acts," "the abomination," or "sodomy" – which itself is just a Biblical euphemism) that heterosexuality did not need to be openly contrasted with it – the sometimes-fatal oppression with which gays were faced ensured that no alternative to heterosexuality could be spoken of. It was when gays began to name themselves and claim a place for their lives as an alternative to the oppressive normative type that it became necessary to distinguish modes of living. Whelan mistakes the suppression of an alternative for the non-existence of that alternative, and "normativity" for "universality" (a common mistake, which was the reason for the effort to name and distinguish homosexuality and heterosexuality).

Whelan apparently extends this mistaken assumption to the matter of Constitutional interpretation. If "originalism" was so "normative" that it needed no name, then clearly there were no alternatives to originalism – and just as clearly any alternative propounded today is both an upstart and out of keeping with the Constitution as written (since it did not exist as a mode of understanding the Constitution when written). Whether that is the case historically or not is an ongoing debate. What is obvious is that Whelan's "argument" to that conclusion is as nonsensical as his claim that there are no words for things that are "normative".

This, however, is merely an argument by historical inference. His broader point is the insinuation that everyone who thinks about the matter is an originalist at heart. Here his "test" carries the point. (This "test" and his discussion of it, idiotic as it is, occupies almost half the text of the article.)

Why is "A" obviously not the correct answer (aside from his silly prose, that is)? Because it suggests a subjective test for the meaning of a fairly evident noun phrase. Clearly, we would not query our own "concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life" to determine the meaning of ordinary and self-evident words. And anyone who suggests doing so would, no doubt, be absurd. Whelan's language, of course, is the passage from Planned Parenthood v. Casey that Scalia likes to mock so much; by implication, then, anyone who endorses abortion rights as understood in that decision is both absurd and no originalist (while anyone who recognizes the absurdity of answer "A" should, by rights, be both an originalist and anti-abortion).

But Whelan's cleverness seems to have run far past his dim and groping grasp of the issues he discusses. Notice what Constitutional interpretation problem he is attempting to solve in his "test": to define a phrase that appears in the text of the Constitution (one that has not, in fact, been the subject of dispute). But what piece of reasoning does he quote in response to that challenge? A discussion of the grounding of the supposed state interest in protecting fetal life – a matter of extreme controversy, which is central to abortion jurisprudence, and which does not hinge on the meaning of particular words found in the Constitution. Naturally it would be absurd to employ a general moral concept to define a non-moral noun phrase – but only an idiot would suggest doing so, and that idiot is Edward Whelan. Naturally, also, anyone reading this "test" would reject answer "A," hopefully because they would realize that a concept is not a definition, that moral concepts do not establish etymological facts, and that concepts are not linguistic elements of sentences. What Whelan has done is simply take a piece of interpretive language he does not like, focused on a difficult problem for which there is no unambiguous textual guidance, and ask whether it can be applied to a non-problem centered on unambiguous Constitutional text. He notes, as anyone would, that that procedure is invalid, but then concludes not that idiotic interpretive procedures are invalid but that all interpretive procedures – that do not hinge on undisputed, unambiguous text – are invalid. It apparently never occurs to him that applying the wrong reasoning to a non-problem does not demonstrate anything about what kind of reasoning should be applied to actual problems.

As to his implied point – that "interpretive" readings of the Constitution are always invalid – that makes no more sense than his use of them to solve non-existent linguistic disputes. What conservatives seem never to admit about the abortion case is that, in order to assert that there is a state interest in fetal life at all, they must assert that that life has moral standing sufficient to challenge the interests of the woman whose body it occupies against her will – that is, that they must assert and defend a moral claim about the status of, and moral value of, fetal life. In the Roe decision, this burden was largely approached historically – with discussion of abortion practices in various states over the years, the medical profession's teachings regarding the morality of abortion, and various religious precepts. But these claims would be irrelevant even if they were not contradictory and ambiguous: the fact that something has or has not been done, or that some people do or don't approve of it, has nothing to do with whether it is morally right or the moral claims it rests on are true. What the majority in Roe and in Casey understood is that there is an implicit moral claim grounding any assertion of a state interest in protecting fetal life, and that that claim can only be held true or false in light of moral beliefs or assumptions that the state cannot dictate. (The fact that the Constitution does not state what moral position the states must take is not, as conservatives sometimes argue, evidence that the Roe decision was "made up." The state must still have a reason for privileging the fetus over the woman – and the Constitution's silence on this issue means that no mere assertion of such an interest will suffice. The Court actually did conservatives a favor by assuming that there is a reasonable grounding to their claims in the 3rd trimester even while admitting it was subjective.) The Court did not claim that the fetus obviously did or did not have any particular moral standing. What it said was that any such conclusion can only be reached on the basis of a moral argument that requires certain basic moral assumptions – and that the state must take a neutral position on what those assumptions can be. Thus, each person is at liberty to define for themselves "[their] own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life" – again, not because there is no truth or falsity to such definitions, and not because they are not of extreme moral significance, but because the Constitution grants us liberty of conscience in such matters. Thus, an "interpretive" reading is necessary in cases in which the Constitution is deliberately silent as to the substance of our personal moral beliefs, and is likely to be required in other cases as well. This is so precisely (and appropriately) because the Constitution does not stipulate what moral assumptions are to be accepted in determining the central question that must be determined to give credence to the "state interest" argument in abortion at all. It is not so in cases involving explicitly delineated rules couched in uncontroversial language.

That Whelan cannot seem to see a distinction between these cases – that he assumes that the same approach to Constitutional reading fits every case – that he believes that a direct reading of undisputed language is the appropriate interpretive approach to cases that hinge on disputed concepts that are not dictated by the language of the Constitution – marks off unmistakably the limits of his "cleverness" and of his approach to the law. Newmark's admiration of such confusion is of a piece with her own writing, and Hewitt seems to think that's just fine. We await a conservative who understands their own arguments – or expects other conservatives to do so.