What I make of it is that Webb is a sleazeball politician pandering to the antihistorical superstitions of his white Southern supporters. Certainly Alexander “Cornerstone” Stephens is not the best person to cite as evidence that the Confederacy did not stand for the perpetuation of race slavery.

My question is what you make of Webb’s farrago of half-truths and red herrings.

Even with the advent of atomic bombs, “fissile brew” is still an atrocious mixed metaphor.

How often do you suppose preparing a beverage through boiling or steeping ends up with something likely to produce a nuclear explosion? Strange brew indeed.

Well, “P because Q” doesn’t actually entail that “If it weren’t the case that Q, it wouldn’t be the case that P.” There are cases where one cause trumps another cause that would have been sufficient had the trumping cause not been present: where if Q hadn’t caused P, something else would have.

Example: A is going on a three-day expedition deep into the desert. B wants to kill A, so B secretly poisons the water in A’s canteen. C also wants to kill A, but doesn’t know that B poisoned the canteen, so C drains all the water out of the canteen. A dies in the desert of dehydration; A was killed because C drained the canteen. But it’s still true that even if C hadn’t drained the canteen, A would still have been killed: she just would have been killed by the poisoned water instead of by dehyrdation.

This could also be the case in terms of war justifications. (You might think that there’s a secondary reason that would be sufficient, even if the primary reason turned out not to be sufficient after all.) But of course you’re right that most people argue in the way you have in mind are just making excuses for a predetermined policy, so just about anything at all would do. In that case you’re right that the “because” hasn’t been earned.

I think it grabs the attention of the fence-sitting archist, especially the statist male heterosexuals.

Like there aren’t enough drooling statist male heterosexuals in This Movement of Ours already.

I’m waiting for the upcoming beefcake calendar from those sexy Catallarchs, personally.