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You are here: Home / Playful thought experiment

Playful thought experiment

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This post is in: 

I wish I knew how to quit you, Kaplan Q&A:

Rochester, N.Y.: What is the purpose of a piece like the one you wrote? Obama is president now and is not likely to nominate himself for the Court.

So why would you speculate about something so far from the realm of reality? Isn’t this kind of silliness exactly what The New Republic is mocked for?

Jeffrey Rosen: The piece is a playful thought experiment, and the topic was suggested by the editors of Outlook. Of course, I don’t think it’s likely to happen — or even that it should. But I thought the hypothetical was worth entertaining, because the qualities that Obama might bring to the Court are ones he might think about in choosing future justices.

Reader Interactions

48Comments

  1. 1.

    norbizness

    Here’s a suggestion: You don’t have to quit it at all. Just disable the CTRL, C, and V keys on your keyboard.

  2. 2.

    JohnR

    “The piece is a playful thought experiment”

    Aha! It actually makes some sense now – the publication formerly known as The Washington Post is now the on-paper equivalent of Doonesbury’s JJ Caucus – a performance artist, misunderstood by the Great Unwashed.

  3. 3.

    Napoleon

    DougJ, I am pretty sure there is some kind of 12 step program you could enroll in to cure your problem. I mean after all if Tiger Woods can be cured of a sex addiction (and how exactly do you do that) there must be some place in Arizona you can check your self into for 10 weeks until you are better.

  4. 4.

    DanF

    Here’s a playful thought experiment: Rosen would make an excellent stable boy as he likes shoveling shit (although the shit he likes to shovel is usually regarded as less useful than horse manure).

  5. 5.

    Prattlehorn

    You guys are being too nice.

    FUCK Rosen and his “because the qualities Obama might bring…”

    That’s bullshit.

    He wrote it to find yet one more way to delegitimize Obama.

    “Hey, he’s not fit to be President. So let’s talk about how he’d be washing my car or shining my shoes.”

  7. 7.

    dmsilev

    I propose a different gedankanexperiment. We put Rosen in a large box along with a vial of poison gas, a hammer, and a single-photon detector. Then we send in a single photon.

    Then we leave the box shut, because really, who cares?

    -dms

  10. 10.

    gypsy howell

    ….”playful thought experiment” being Wapo code for “I couldn’t figure out anything of substance to write about”

  11. 11.

    Linda Featheringill

    Actually, Barack Obama would make an excellent Supreme. But it isn’t likely to happen.

    If I were in his place, I would be looking forward to the freedom of action that goes along with being an ex-president.

  12. 12.

    neill

    so if Obama assigns some 3- or 4-year-olds the first cut listing of potential Supreme Court nominees, he might want to include in their packet of materials Rosen’s playful thought experiment.

    What a fucking retard.

  13. 13.

    gypsy howell

    @Linda Featheringill:

    he may get that chance sooner rather than later if he & the rest of the dems don’t get their shit together. Hey, maybe that was his endgame all along — aspire to the post-presidency of Jimmy Carter.

  14. 14.

    Will

    I really couldn’t believe that piece yesterday. It could only have been written by someone as completely unserious as Jeffrey Rosen. Probably the most ridiculous hypothetical I’ve ever read.

    It beats Safire’s 2004 prediction that Wes Clark would win the nomination, then somehow give it to Hillary at the last minute. How and why that would happen was left unexplained in the entire column. Much like this Jeffrey Rosen piece of shit.

    He might as well have hypothesized Obama personally manning a mission to Mars.

  15. 15.

    jenniebee

    I suppose it’s not entirely without precedent (wasn’t William Howard Taft both president and chief justice?) but as long as we’re already planning Obama’s retirement party one year into his first term, why not just go whole hog and riff about possible sites for his presidential library? I’m betting they could find someone to write something subtly incendiary enough about the desirability of various Chicago* neighborhoods to dog-whistle Mayor Daley into a response, at which point you have zomg! controversy!

    *The Obama library should totally be on Oahu anyway. You don’t get a slavishly dedicated (and attractively tanned) cadre of Obama scholars by putting your library in Chicago. That’s all I’m saying.

  17. 17.

    John Dillinger

    How about this “playful thought experiment” for the WaPo. Pretend they have a time machine to go back to 2000, and use actualy journalistic capabilities to warn its readers what would happen if Bush was elected instead of Gore.

  19. 19.

    jim

    As a “thought experiment” it’s reasonable to speculate that Barack Obama being appointed to the Supremes would radically improve their overall calibre.

    Ditto Bill Clinton.

    To judge by their most recent major decision, at this point the same benefit could be said to result in regards to appointing the Olsen Twins – or a lawn-gnome & a Chia Pet.

  21. 21.

    bayville

    Funny. Is this you as well?

    Tiger Woods

    Howie, your coverage of Tiger Woods has been unparalleled. Why does the rest of the media refuse to recognize the importance of Woods’ sex life? Please continue the fine work.

    A.Howard Kurtz writes:

    You know, the people who complain that Tiger isn’t real “news” are missing something. There’s a reason that ABC, CBS, NBC and the cable news channels carried his apology live, and it goes beyond ratings. This is not just a sports story and not just a sex story. Tiger Woods is one of the most famous people on the planet. He has raked in $100 million a year in corporate endorsements by peddling a family-man image that turned out to be totally bogus. Golf ratings have plummeted 54 percent with him out of action. And the collapse of his career, at least temporarily, is one hell of a human interest story. On Friday, everyone I encountered–women, men, non-sports fans–was talking about Tiger’s apology and had strong opinions one way or the other. I thought the WP and NYT erred by not putting the stories on the front page. Sometimes you can’t be above the news, and any way you slice it, this was news.

  25. 25.

    licensed to kill time

    DougJ, you can’t quit the Kaplan Q&A – it’s too damn amusing for us! Just like a pusherman you got us hooked, too (first question is always free) and a serious jones would result if you stopped.

    Don’t cut us off, bro!

  26. 26.

    SiubhanDuinne

    This is about the New York Times, not WaPo, but generally conforms to the theme of this thread.

    About 6:30 this morning, I posted on the only active thread at the time (Anne Laurie’s music open thread) about an obvious and egregious error of fact in Douthat’s column, in which he identified Senator John Ensign as being from Arizona. (I didn’t bother to comment on the column itself, as it was beneath contempt and beyond ridiculous.) In my 6:30 post I bemoaned not only the error by someone who is supposed to be so knowledgeable about politics, but also the fact that no one in the NYT’s editing/fact-checking/proofreading process had caught it.

    “Arizona Sen. John Ensign” was up for at least five hours, to my certain knowledge — not sure what time it was uploaded, but it wasn’t corrected until almost noon today.

    And now I am peeved all over again. Whatever happened to the NYT’s former policy of pointing out even minor corrections when they’re made? — something like “Sen. John Ensign is from Nevada, not Arizona as originally indicated. We have corrected the item and regret the error.” They *always* used to do this. But now, they have made the correction (good!) but say nothing about having made the change, which I think is cowardly of them.

    Sheesh, if John and DougJ can make corrections on a blog and (usually) acknowledge that they’re doing so (“Fixed it, thanks”), why can’t the damn New. York. Times?

    I don’t mean to make so much of Douthat’s single error of fact — we’ve all done things like that, and worse — and if it were an isolated instance I wouldn’t mention it. But that it made print (pixel) is symptomatic of a huge decline in rigorous newsroom standards. Leaving aside the mammoth issue of editorial judgement, which is really a different topic, it would be nice to think that the paper of record could get a factual attribution right, or at least own up to their original error when they make the correction (which is a kind of implicit promise to the reader that they’ll try to do better next time).

    The above comments refer only to the online version. Haven’t seen the dead-tree edition.

    /rant (for the moment)

  28. 28.

    flounder

    I can’t quit it either:

    The liberal equivalent of CPAC
    Since you are discussing whether there is an equivalent liberal event for CPAC, I just want to note the following information: In Saturday’s Washington Post, AP’s Washington Bureau Chief Ron Fornier wrote an “analysis” where he noted that Mitt Romney lied at CPAC about the stimulus, Democratic health care proposals, tax policy, and treatment of terrorists. Fornier went on to say that Romney’s lies are balanced out because an anonymous blogger at Daily Kos lied by called Dick Cheney a “war criminal” because Cheney admitted to signing off on waterboarding yet has not been convicted. If a journalist like Ron Fornier is saying that the words of CPAC speaker and Republican presidential hopeful are equal to the comments of an anonymous DKos blogger, then I believe that the liberal equivalent of the CPAC convention is me sitting here alone in my underwear and typing this message.
    undefined writes:
    I thought Fournier’s piece was good and that more journalists should aggressively fact-check what politicians of both parties say. But it’s a stretch to partially “balance” the piece by comparing a speech by the former governor and presidential candidate to what one unnamed blogger said on the Kos site.
    Thanks for the chat, folks.

  29. 29.

    Justin

    I think that’s a fair response by Jeff.

    The Wall Street Post has so many ridiculous op-eds, that I’m not sure progressives should be looking for something to be offended about.

  30. 30.

    Brachiator

    @jenniebee:

    I suppose it’s not entirely without precedent (wasn’t William Howard Taft both president and chief justice?)

    So, as long as this bonehead is doing thought experiments, how about one in which both Clintons and Obama are all appointed to the Supreme Court, with Obama as Chief Justice?

    And then ask the GOP what they think of this.

    … but as long as we’re already planning Obama’s retirement party one year into his first term, why not just go whole hog and riff about possible sites for his presidential library? I’m betting they could find someone to write something subtly incendiary enough about the desirability of various Chicago* neighborhoods to dog-whistle Mayor Daley into a response, at which point you have zomg! controversy!

    Even more incendiary would be the suggestion that Obama’s presidential library might be located outside the United States, following the lines of birther insanity.

  32. 32.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Brachiator #30: I love it! Put the Obama prezlib in Kenya. Or Indonesia. Or Hawaii. One of them furrin places.

  33. 33.

    freelancer

    @Justin:

    I’m not sure progressives should be looking for something to be offended about.

    Then what would progressives do with themselves?

    In my liberal education, I became educated about liberals, and the huge emotional draw of a large swaft of lefty activism amounts to little more than feeling good about yourself. They may have the facts, and the logic on their side, but it doesn’t mean that the largest motivator for the unhinged left is self-esteem and fulfilling unresolved emotional needs.

    /hippie-punching.

  36. 36.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @HyperIon #35: Thanks for the update. I’m still not seeing any acknowledgement, just the corrected column copy. Maybe it doesn’t show up on mobile devices, in which case I withdraw that part of my criticism and apologize to the NYT (and to all of you for carrying on unnecessarily).

  37. 37.

    tomvox1

    But I thought the hypothetical was worth entertaining, because the qualities that Obama might bring to the Court are ones he might think about in choosing future justices.

    Circle. Jerk.
    Maybe this douche can write a follow-up about the hypothetical that Obama might clone himself and subsequently nominate his clone to the Supreme Court since he is the one he’s been waiting for to be a future justice…or something.

  38. 38.

    sparky

    as usual, good setup for a clever headline, so good on you. any nibbles from the NY Post?

    but, uh, seriously, (and as you well know) Rosen teaches law. that means he gets paid to dream up wacky hypos. to the extent there’s an issue here (as distinct from the usual institutional failures of the corporatist media) it’s the disappearance of the notion that an editor (distinct from today’s celebrity-enabling copy-approver) would have said, upon being presented with this idea, “get your head out of your ass and go think up an actual idea as opposed to this jerk-off junk.”

    Come back Mr. Shawn!

  39. 39.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @DougJ #27
    @SiubhanDuinne #31

    Well I’ll be damned. Turns out there *is* a way to copy-and-paste in the ‘Berry. I had no idea! That Google doohickey all you kids use, that’s quite something.

    This will make Life at Balloon-Juice much easier.

    (Still don’t know how to do an actual screen grab but c-‘n’-p will do it for now.)

    DougJ, it may not have been your intention, but you’ve managed to provide me with a whole new skill set today. Thanks!

  40. 40.

    liberal

    Rosen has a long history as a douchebag. Greenwald had an excellent post on Rosen’s despicable article on Sotomayor (latter was in the hasn’t-been-liberal-since-the-1970s TNR).

  42. 42.

    liberal

    @freelancer:

    They may have the facts, and the logic on their side, but it doesn’t mean that the largest motivator for the unhinged left is self-esteem and fulfilling unresolved emotional needs.

    Well, that might be, but the good thing about being a liberal/leftist is that at least some fraction of the grouping isn’t unhinged. Can’t say that about the right or the so-called “middle”.

  43. 43.

    serge

    “But I thought the hypothetical was worth entertaining, because the qualities that Obama might bring to the Court are ones he might think about in choosing future justices.”

    And if a frog had wings, he wouldn’t bump his ass so much.

    Does this mean I kin rite for the WP? (My hometown paper and a travesty now. Except for Sally Quinn who’s been entertaining all of DC for decades, though not in the salon sense…though she has been known to “entertain,” just ask a younger Ben Bradlee, well you get the drift.)

  44. 44.

    liberal

    @jim:

    Ditto Bill Clinton.

    Problem with Clinton is the same one with Sotomayor: might not live that long.

    We need to appoint liberal jurists who will live a long, long, long time.

  45. 45.

    liberal

    @John Dillinger:

    … warn its readers what would happen if Bush was elected instead of Gore.

    Since those douchebags still think the (criminal decision) to invade Iraq was the right one, I’m not sure they’d do that even if they could.

    Bush probably lowered their taxes, too, so what’s not to like?

  46. 46.

    matoko_chan

    yeah like Reihan’s “playful thought experiments.”
    He said i was contemptuous of my one-time conservative comrades.
    Sowwy Reihan, Conor and company……it isnt contempt……
    it is horrified incredulous loathing.

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