Krugman points out:
A language thing: many people have been characterizing my attack on the Ryan roadmap as "ad hominem." I think this represents a devaluation of the term.
As I've always understood it, ad hominem attacks involve attacking the person in general rather than what the person has to say on a specific issue. It means that instead of saying that Professor X seems to have played fast and loose with the data in his latest study, you say that Professor X's mother was a hamster and his father smelt of elderberries; or, to take some non-random examples, you habitually refer to someone as "former Enron consultant Paul Krugman," or invariably bring the size of Al Gore's house into discussions of climate change.
Now, I didn't do anything like that. I did point out that Ryan appears to be faking it in the selling of his plan - and I documented that assertion with specifics on the plan, on how he gamed the CBO process, and on the differences between how he talks about the deficit and what his plan would actually do.
That's not ad hominem; it's just being blunt.
This is not a new thing, but it is not as prominent as another related (usually) rightwing practice: that of redefining "rights", particularly the First Amendment, to mean two nearly opposite things: one for conservatives, and one for everyone else. In fact, Krugman is being far too nice here. Ryan is, quite simply, a charlatan. And Krugman has not been shy about pointing it out. This ought to be the job of any and all beat reporters who deal with Ryan, but then, that's not what the Versailles media is for.
What's happening here is one of the conservatives favorite 5-year-old tactics: "I know you are, but what am I?" Whatever outrageous thing they try to pull, when they get called on it, they turn around and accuse whoever called them on it of doing exactly the same thing.
Duplicistous climate scientists, anyone? Racists at the NAACP? A racist black president?
The good thing about fallacies is that they have names, which makes it easier to identify them, point them out, discuss them in general terms, compare diffeent examples, just generally get a handle on them.
And so, since this new pattern is emerging of using projection to falsely accuse people of fallacious reasoning, we really ought to develop a term for that, as well.
I don't really have a good suggestion for it, so I'll throw it open for comments. But this really is one of the most important things we can do when dealing with rightwing hegemonic warfare. Think of it sort of like generating antibodies. You learn to spot this sort of disease vector at a cellular level, so you don't have to think it all through all over again every time it happens.
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