Kerfuffle. It's a strange word. Not exactly the sort of word you'd find yourself using every day, is it? I wouldn't. There's an archaic quality to "kerfuffle," and also something sophomoric. It's most commonly used to mean "commotion," but can also indicate "a state of disorder." A more everyday synonym would be, mainly, commotion, but also "to-do," "stir," "disruption" or "disturbance."
Why do I bring up "kerfuffle"? Because I ran across it more than once reading blogs today, and I noticed that both blogs on which I read the word "kerfuffle" happened to be conservative.
Odd coincidence? Perhaps. Consider, though, that both sources, supposedly independent of one another, used the term to casually dismiss serious ongoing investigations against Republicans for wrong-doing.
Still think it's a coincidence? Did I mention I found a third instance, also today, of "kerfuffle" being used in this way? Let's consider the evidence...
CONFEDERATE YANKEE
Oh, Lord, how I hate linking to this blog. It is unbearably loathsome. I mean, it's all right there in that blog name, isn't it?
Anyway, discussing the wiretapping fiasco, the (sigh) Confederate Yankee starts his column thusly (emphasis mine):
The kerfluffle around Bush's executive order to the NSA just keeps getting more and more interesting...On Christmas Eve, Stewart Powell of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer released a column showing that the secret FISA court that is supposed to approve government surveillance efforts was apparently exceeding its authority, forcing the Administration to go around a judicial roadblock to protect the American people.
He proceeds to provide a quote that does not, in fact, prove anything about the FISA court blocking neccessary wiretaps. Instead, the quote simply says that the FISA court modified more of Bush's wiretap requests (modified, not denied) than any other previous administration. But, if Bush presumably requested a lot more FISA wiretaps than any prior administration, couldn't this just be a meaningless statistic that doesn't reflect the actual percentage of approved wiretaps overall? Of course.
But no matter. My interest is the word "kerfuffle," here charmingly misspelled as "kerfluffle," as in "The guy from Confederate Yankee wants to be George Bush's kerfluffer." Oh, wait...
The use of a silly word like "kerfuffle" indicates CY's derision towards this outcry. Indeed, he's openly condemning efforts to stop Bush from spying on everyone in the post. On to the next example:
IRISH PENNANTS
I like how these guys just make things up to suit their arguments, but pretend as if they are established facts. Like you'd be stupid not to know them. Take a look at this kerfuffle-laden sentence from this piece of shit's rant-filled site:
The Valerie Plame kerfuffle was an attempted political assassination by left wingers at the CIA, like-minded journalists, and the Democratic party. It has tormented the administration for years. The disclosure that Valerie Plame worked at the CIA did nothing to harm national security, unlike the recent leak of the NSA intercept program, and the earlier leak of the secret CIA prisons for al Qaida bigwigs.
Again, on the same day, we see a conservative blog dismiss a major Republican scandal as a mere kerfuffle, a case of antagonistic Democrats making something out of nothing. Rather than the fact that the president is spying on his own citizens illegally, now they're dismissing his administration's outing of an undercover CIA official.
And how does "jkelly" of Irish Pennants know that Plame's outing didn't affect national security? As far as I know, no formal investigation has gone on to determine what sort of compromising effects that information may have had. (Although it would be nice if, like a reasonable individual, jkelly should concede that our leaders shouldn't break the law, even if their violation doesn't directly harm their nation's security.)
THE POLITICAL PIT BULL
The most vile site I will link to today. Here's the charming phrase honored as PPB's "Quote of the Day!"
"Anybody who doesn't appreciate what America has done, and President Bush, let them go to hell!" -Betty Dawisha
Oh, you guys are neat!
There's also a certain-to-be-hilarious post called "God Damn Hippies, I Hate 'Em." Ooooohhh, PPB you done gone too far now. A smackdown on a youth movement that's been dead for over 30 years...Oh no you di-int!
Anyway, Greg Tinti is concurring with a long, stupid post arguing unconvincingly that stupid libruls in the librul media are out of touch with America, which loves George Bush and doesn't care about wiretaps and is still really really scared of the bearded browns.
I couldn't agree more. Yet some Democrats are betting on this NSA kerfuffle as their ticket to '06 success and, possibly, the ultimate liberal wet dream: the impeachment of W. And by "some Democrats," I mean the ones that are borderline delusional.
It's SUCH TYPICAL right-wing venom, it could have come from the Cheese Doodle Powder-stained keyboard of Karl Rove himself. All the usual beats are there...Predicting doom for your opponents as if you're an impartial observer, dismissing a major scandal lightly without evidence, declaring anyone on the other side "delusional."
AND THIS BRINGS ME AROUND TO MY POINT.
I know that the White House basically controls the communication of the entire right-wing blogosphere. What they say, the blogs repeat endlessly until it is accepted as fact. But it's becoming clear that there are actual scripts written up by some central authority and disseminated to these pretend journalists and commentators.
3 people in one day will not, I repeat, WILL NOT INDEPENDENTLY OF ONE ANOTHER USE THE WORD "KERFUFFLE." IT'S A RIDICULOUSLY STUPID WORD. They must have heard it from somewhere.
There are two options.
(1) They heard it from each other, proving that the right-wing blogosphere is nothing more than a circle-jerk, repeating the same shallow ideas back and forth to one another in an endless loop.
(2) They all heard it from someone and dutifully repeated it to their respective audiences.
I'm betting on #2, but will allow that #1 is pretty much equally likely.
A few comments:
ReplyDelete1) You show a lot guts making this post without concerns that you are now being tapped yourself. ;)
2) It is very possible that the term was used on some TV show or radio show in the last several days which all the bloggers paid attention too. This is most likely and reflects no nefarious conspiracy.
3) Statistically, there are a certain number of coincidences one should expect from a random sample. Allow me to explain:
Let's say you were to roll a die 4 times in a row. If you were to roll 4 consecutive 1's, you would probably be pretty surprised. After all, the probability of that happening was 1/6^4 = about 0.0007.
Now, you would have been equally surprised with four 4's, four 2's, etc . . . So the true probability of witnessing this type of coincidence is about 6 times the original figure.
Now, suppose you were to roll the same die 100 times. What would the probability be of having the same number repeated 4 consecutive times? Rather than explain the math behind this calculation, I will simulate this process using the random number generator in Microsoft Excel.
After looking at 200 sets of 100 random die rolls, 60 of the sets had this happen at least once, and the phenomenon happened a total of 80 times. This means that something which we established happens very infrequently would appear to happen very often given a large enough set of random numbers.
This brings me back to your point. If you had begun your week with the question of how likely is it that the word kerfuffle will appear in 3 conservative blogs this week, the answer would have been extremely low. However, there are hundreds, if not thousands of words that you would have been similarly surprised to see used frequently after the fact. There are also many blogs. Finally, you have been observing blogs for a long time. Statistically, your observation does little to demonstrate that the occurence is not random. Moreover, if it truly is not random (as I suspect), there are many events that would make the probability of the word being used repeatedly more likely. (it appeared on a word of the day calendar, it was used by a pundit, etc . . .)
One more point: I am against wiretapping without a warrant; however, I see almost no chance of this resulting in impeachment.
Lons, you continue to regularly inform and entertain me with your blog. Keep up the good work and have a wonderful new year!
Thanks,
Beowulf
Thanks for the kind words and the extremely well thought-out and imminantly reasonable comment.
ReplyDeleteHowever I still disagree.
Probability loses a lot of meaning when you start talking about word choice. The fact is, "kerfuffle" is an obscure word that, in this case, is even what I would consider poorly chosen. The chances of three prominant righty bloggers all using it within 2 days of one another is exceptionally low.
Is it possible that this is coincidental? Sure. Could they have picked it up from somewhere? ABSOLUTELY.
That was really my point. If they heard, say, Sean Hannity use it the other day, and then they all parrot his message VERBATIM, using the same language, that's an interesting phenomenon. To my mind.
And for the record, I'm also not expecting impeachment. I think this, like about 100 other things Bush has done, is a crime WORTHY of impeachment that will not RESULT in actual impeachment, because the president's party controls the Congress.