George W. Bush vs. Aristotle.

From the BBC's coverage of Tim Russert's Sunday morning stroke-job interview with the President on NBC's "Meet the Press":

On his own military service, Mr Bush criticised the senior Democrats who have suggested that he did not show up for duty in the Alabama National Guard in 1972 where he served during the Vietnam era.

"They're just wrong. There may be no evidence, but I did report; otherwise I wouldn't have been honourably discharged," he said.

Ah, the teleological argument, a favorite of the Bible-thumping Creationists and their pseudo-scientific notion of "Intelligent Design" who just so happen to make up I, Dubious' rank and file. The argument proceeds more or less like this:

1. The Universe is very complex;

2. Such complexity must be the work of God, despite the total lack of direct evidence of such a Supreme Being, therefore

3. The Universe is very complex because God designed it.

Dubya's argument is strikingly similar:

1. I was honorably discharged from the National Guard;

2. Such an honorable discharge must be proof that I reported for duty and served as expected, despite the total lack of direct evidence that I did so, therefore

3. I was honorably discharged because I reported for duty and served as expected.

The problem with both arguments is that they're logically unsound. The number two of each is presented as the only possible explanation, when in fact other possibilities do exist. The case for Intelligent Design ignores the possibility that complexity might have arisen through billions of years of accumulated chance (a great example of this is when you take a room with two to the thousandth power people in it to pair up, flip a coin, and call heads or tails; eventually you will end up with one person in the room who has won the coin toss a thousand times in a row, not through any divine agency but through the steady accumulation of statistics), just as Dubya asks us to ignore the possibility that his honorable discharge may have resulted from other causes than that of having served with honor, such as - oh, I don't know - the fact that his father was the ambassador to the United Nations at the time!

What really burns my toast is that when Bill Clinton resorted to such acts of sophistry and spurious logic, it was supposed to speak volumes about his "character". Now that the Bush administration is busy telling us things like "the absence of evidence does not indicate the evidence of absence", and parsing the difference between immiment and gathering threats or the possession of versus the potential for making Weapons of Mass Destruction, and is resorting to bullshiat logical sleight-of-hand to try and explain away our self-proclaimed "War President"'s military service record, what is that supposed to say about their character? Or does the door of outrage not swing both ways for our latter-day moral crusaders?