There is a quote that I’ve been using in email for the last several years, hoping that it was more than wishful thinking.
“…we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles.” – Thomas Jefferson
Lately, I have noticed more and more news outlets “recovering their true sight.”
Tonight, the Associated Press is actually running a story about one of my long-time Bushian bugaboos:
Bush Using Straw-Man Arguments in SpeechesMar 18, 12:52 PM (ET)
By JENNIFER LOVEN
WASHINGTON (AP) – “Some look at the challenges in Iraq and conclude that the war is lost and not worth another dime or another day,” President Bush said recently.
Another time he said, “Some say that if you’re Muslim you can’t be free.”
“There are some really decent people,” the president said earlier this year, “who believe that the federal government ought to be the decider of health care … for all people.”
Of course, hardly anyone in mainstream political debate has made such assertions.
When the president starts a sentence with “some say” or offers up what “some in Washington” believe, as he is doing more often these days, a rhetorical retort almost assuredly follows.
The device usually is code for Democrats or other White House opponents. In describing what they advocate, Bush often omits an important nuance or substitutes an extreme stance that bears little resemblance to their actual position.
He typically then says he “strongly disagrees” – conveniently knocking down a straw man of his own making.
Bush routinely is criticized for dressing up events with a too-rosy glow. But experts in political speech say the straw man device, in which the president makes himself appear entirely reasonable by contrast to supposed “critics,” is just as problematic.
Because the “some” often go unnamed, Bush can argue that his statements are true in an era of blogs and talk radio. Even so, “‘some’ suggests a number much larger than is actually out there,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
A specialist in presidential rhetoric, Wayne Fields of Washington University in St. Louis, views it as “a bizarre kind of double talk” that abuses the rules of legitimate discussion.
“It’s such a phenomenal hole in the national debate that you can have arguments with nonexistent people,” Fields said. “All politicians try to get away with this to a certain extent. What’s striking here is how much this administration rests on a foundation of this kind of stuff.”
It goes on from there. Granted, this isn’t really “news” in that it’s been going on for years, but someone at the Associated Press thought it was worth writing an article about, and their editors decided it was worth running. I have noticed that Bush is pulling out the straw men more often, and in ever more nonsensical ways, so maybe that’s part of it. I mean, the straw man has to sound at least vaguely believable for the manuver to work, and some of them are lately, well, just insane. The article mentions another one:
“There’s some in America who say, ‘Well, this can’t be true there are still people willing to attack,’” Bush said during a January visit to the NSA.
I would submit that the number of Americans saying that is smaller than the number of Americans who believe in the Great Pumpkin. If anything, Americans feel there are more people out there willing to attack us. Quite a few Iraqis, for instance.
But I digress. After I’ve spent so long wondering why he was never being called on such rhetorical garbage, here the Associated Press is calling him on it! Somehow, it’s now OK in the media to acknowledge that the Emperor is underdressed. The spells are beginning to dissolve.
One can only hope that the people will “restore their government to its true principles” before too much longer.