Lessons In BushSpeak

by tristero

An interesting range of comments to this post regarding the defeat of mandatory vaccination of young girls in Texas to prevent potential cancer later in life. Perhaps the most intriguing comments took the form of, “I’m not saying you don’t have a point that the Republican objections to it are despicable, but there are legitimate issues at stake here, for example [choose one: ungodly Big Pharma profits; influence peddling; long term side effects; a dangerously weakened FDA under Bush].”

Well, that sounds like legitimate reasoning and in normal times, surely it would be. But let’s not forget we live in the Age of Bush. True, there are sensible reasons to consider many of the objections to mandating vaccination not very compelling – for example, it does not make the slightest moral sense for young girls to be at a heightened risk of future cancer merely because Big Pharma profits obscenely [UPDATE: before you howl in rage at my cynical dismissal of dangerously rampant capitalism, see the last paragraph]. However, the clue that there really are no serious real-world problems to protecting young girls – only Republican talking points – lies in the rhetorical strucure of the objection:

“We should not and are now not going to offer the 165,000 11-year-olds in Texas up to be the study group for Merck to find out what the implications of this vaccine would be for these girls…”

Despite a pompous and clearly unnecessary precision – who knew there were 165,00 11-year-olds in Texas? And is that number relevant? Would it change anything if there were 150,00 or 200 million? – Bonnen’s comment is, by intent, such an utterly vague objection that it has no content at all. Is Bonnen referring to legitimate drug-testing issues? Or is he afraid that vaccinating young girls will turn them into sex-crazed harpies intent on corrupting the virtue of Texan manhood (such as it is)?

And in that vagueness of subject lies the clue that there are no legitimate reasons for opposing the vaccination. For if there were, there’d be no reason for him to be so vague and coy. Bonnen would have told us exactly what they were.

This rhetorical sliminess is quite typical of BushSpeak. For many of us, it was quite clear from the instant they were uttered that the famous 16 words were a bald-faced lie of monumental proportions:

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

Why were we positive Bush was lying? Because no one who is telling the truth talks like this about such a serious subject. Notice the first five words. It’s not that Saddam recently sought significant quantities yadda yadda, but only that “the Briitish government has learned.” If there was any real evidence, and if Bush had any real confidence in that evidence, I assure you there would be no qualifications. Nevertheless, the impression created – via context and sentence structure and possibly even verbal emphasis when delivered – was not that the British government reported something the US couldn’t confirm despite the obvious importance of doing so, but rather that Saddam was acquiring nuclear bombs. Notice also the utterly superfluous but rhetorically important “significant” – as if the acquisition of even a single grain of uranium by Saddam would be anything less than totally alarming to an American public that had been told to expect the next Sept 11 as a mushroom cloud. No. An honest president with legitimate concerns for America’s safety would have begun, “The US government has learned,” and then proceeded actually to spend some time describing how and what we learned. The State of the Union is exactly the place to lay out such a case, if there was any legitimacy to it.

Therefore, it was clear that no one in the Bush administration – including Bush himself, or he surely would have approved a stronger statement that was less carefully hedged – believed for a second that Saddam had recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. They just wanted you to believe it, and they were prepared to lie about it. And they did. Similarly, Bonnen doesn’t really believe there are any serious and real objections to mandating a vaccination that could protect the spread of cancer, including the possibility that vaccinating these girls will lead to teenage sexual activity. Because if he did, he’d have rephrased his soundbite in order to spell out exactly what those “implications” were.

This is not to say that concerns about longterm effects aren’t important, or that Big Pharma’s greed isn’t real. Rather, what I am saying is that you can’t have a serious discussion of such concerns within the context of modern Republican rhetoric. That’s because the very structure of their objections is deliberately misleading when it’s not utterly truthless. Before a genuine exploration of the pros and cons of a mandated vaccination program can begin, you must ground that discussion in reality. But a discussion that is begun and framed in such a deliberately deceitful, amorphous, and bellicose fashion as it was by the Republican Representative from Texas can only end up the way it began: completely inane.