I caught just a glimpse of C-SPAN's Washington Journal this morning (here). Peter Slen's guest during the second hour was Air America on-air personality, Rachel Maddow, who offered her slant on politics in between viewer calls.

Walking by the TV, I was struck by her snarky throw-away analysis of the rationale for war in Iraq (paraphrasing):

Did we go to war over WMD? Or to depose a ruthless dictator? Or to liberate women from Muslim fundamentalism? Or to shore up a leaky sanctions regime? Or to make the Middle East less unstable? Or to move offending American troops out of Saudi Arabia? Or to provide consequences for a rogue state that flouted international authority?

Her litany of "shifting justifications" implied that the President should pick ONE.

The answer to those "either/or" questions, obviously, is YES. We invaded Iraq for all the reasons enumerated above and more.

It is unfair to single out this one unfortunate person, for she is emblematic of a host of Bush detractors. In fact, I continue to be puzzled by the plethora of well-educated anti-war activists who reject multi-causal reasoning on this particular issue.

Maddow, an authentic "San Francisco liberal," possesses genuine progressive intellectual bona fides.

From her bio (in full here):

"Rachel has a doctorate in political science [from Oxford] (she was a Rhodes Scholar) and a background in HIV/AIDS activism, prison reform, and other lefty rabblerousing."

"Rachel is 33 years old and lives in New York City and rural Western Massachusetts with her partner, artist Susan Mikula."

And from another friendly source, Maddow, a Stanford grad, "became the first openly-gay American to be awarded a Rhodes Scholarship."

If someone asked Dr. Maddow a serious question of great import, my guess is that she would pause, scratch her chin, look deeply into the eyes of the inquirer and say:

"That is a complicated issue for which there are no simple answers."

I am an historian by training. The first day of history school we were all made to write fifty times on the blackboard:

"History is the multi-layered study of change over time. Mono-causal explanations for human events are rarely accurate. Rather, think in terms of multiple motives. History is the product of a complicated web of contingency."

I am confident that Dr. Maddow understands this truism. In fact, my hunch is that she thinks President Bush is a simpleton inclined toward "black and white" thinking. Furthermore, I wager that she consciously favored the candidate in 2004 that she thought understood that "nuance" was an essential element to good leadership.

Ironically, the people who are, in general, most likely to see the world as "complex" and "gray" are the same folks who are most likely to frame this particular issue in the most elementary terms.

My question: are Dr. Maddow and her cohorts purposely demagoguing the issue for partisan reasons? That is, all's fair in love, war, and in aid of a just cause, which includes employing rhetorical leger demain to sway the public debate.

Or, are they so blinded by their opposition to the President that they have temporarily lost their intellectual moorings, forsaking years of training and falling into the logical quick sand of "either/or" reasoning and monocausality?

These are complicated questions for which there are no definitve answers.

Regardless, the public discourse is ill-served by this brand of sloppy thinking.