{"id":6894,"date":"2006-03-20T09:43:40","date_gmt":"2006-03-20T14:43:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=6894"},"modified":"2006-03-20T09:43:40","modified_gmt":"2006-03-20T14:43:40","slug":"bush-is-at-his-best-when-his-opponent-doesnt-exist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/bush-is-at-his-best-when-his-opponent-doesnt-exist\/","title":{"rendered":"Bush is at his best when his opponent doesn’t exist"},"content":{"rendered":"

In case you missed it over the weekend, the AP wrote the kind of article that’s entirely too rare: the kind that calls Bush on his bogus rhetorical games<\/a>. In this instance, the AP’s Jennifer Loven, to her enormous credit, explained that 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.”<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p>\n

Of course, hardly anyone in mainstream political debate has made such assertions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hallelujah, the AP noticed. Bush has long believed the best way for him to win a policy debate is to fight against an opponent that doesn’t exist.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bush bravely takes on those who oppose education accountability, those who disapprove of protecting Americans, those who don’t believe in democracy, and those who believe terrorists are harmless. I feel safer already.<\/p>\n

For that matter, as Swopa noted<\/a>, “Democrats can even turn the Shrub’s ‘some say…’ stunts against him by noting that ‘arguments with nonexistent people’ are just what you’d expect from a president who so often seems to be living in fantasyland.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In case you missed it over the weekend, the AP wrote the kind of article that’s entirely too rare: the kind that calls Bush on his bogus rhetorical games. In this instance, the AP’s Jennifer Loven, to her enormous credit, explained that when the president “starts a sentence with ‘some say’ or offers up what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6894"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6894\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}