Please Steal From MORE Of My Posts! I Don’t Mind In The Slightest!
by tristero
Sorry, folks. I just can’t resist. Jennifer Loven of AP today (March 19, 2006):
“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.
…
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.
Here is a three sentence excerpt of what he [Bush] actually said in that speech:
[T]here are some who would like to rewrite history — revisionist historians is what I like to call them. Saddam Hussein was a threat to America and the free world in ’91, in ’98, in 2003. He continually ignored the demands of the free world, so the United States and friends and allies acted.
This short phrase is packed with a breathtaking array of logical fallacies, grammatical errors, lies by omission, distortions, and grotesquely unfair attacks. The most egregious tactic is, of course, projection . As Bush rewrites the WMD search out of history, he has the unmitigated gall to accuse his opponents of rewriting history.
Bush also uses personalization here: ‘revisionist historians is what I like to call them.’ In a very interesting article in The Nation this week, Renana Brooks discusses the extraordinary amount that Bush personalizes. While The Nation article is not available online, a similar article on Brooks’s website notes that personalization is the ‘hallmark’ of an abusive personality. And, Brooks notes, Bush uses personalization all the time, for example in his speech to Congress immediately post 9/11: ‘I will not falter, I will not tire, I will not fail.’
In addtion, Bush employs one of his favorite constructions in the above quote: ‘There are some who…’ Usually, Bush uses the ‘some who’ technique merely to exaggerate an opponent’s position (the straw man) as ,for example, here, regarding tax cuts: ‘Some members of Congress support tax relief but say my proposal is too big’ . It is rather rare for Bush to combine the straw man with projection, and for good reason. The purpose of a straw man is to create an easily refuted argument. If that straw man is, in fact, a projection of your own position, you are saying that your argument is incredibly weak.
Also, Tristero, June 1, 2003:
And did you catch that straw man towards the end? “Some on the left, I guess are saying force in Iran…” Common Bush construction.
I’m quite serious: if you can use something I wrote in a blog, steal it. Make it your own; don’t bother crediting me if you don’t want to. I’m perfectly delighted! And you don’t have to wait three plus years, you know.
Hat tip to Jeff at Protein Wisdom who really is exactly as Atrios describes him.
[Update: Needlenose notes that when you have arguments with non-existent people, there are some (hah hah!) who will rightly question your sanity.]
[Update: There are some – I just love it! – who think I was seriously accusing an AP reporter of slogging through my three-year-old blogposts looking for story ideas to rip off. To clarify (I hope): I’m sure she wasn’t; obviously I was joking around about that. What’s no joke is that, apparently, it took more than three years before someone in the MSM noticed this obsessive rhetorical tic of Bush’s. If anyone knows of an earlier discussion of the “there are some who” construction, by all means lemme know. When I wrote my posts, I knew of none. I don’t think even Renanna Brooks pointed to them in the Nation article I mentioned.]