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Bush's Straw Men

zakur

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Bush Using Straw-Man Arguments in Speeches

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.
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Bush apologists, I have taken the liberty of typing out your defenses below to save you a little time. Please select from:

A. The examples the writer uses are not really straw man arguments.

B. All politicians do this. Bush is no different from other politicians.

C. Why do you hate America, zakur?

D. All of the above. ;)
 
zakur said:
Bush Using Straw-Man Arguments in Speeches


Bush apologists, I have taken the liberty of typing out your defenses below to save you a little time. Please select from:

A. The examples the writer uses are not really straw man arguments.

B. All politicians do this. Bush is no different from other politicians.

C. Why do you hate America, zakur?

D. All of the above. ;)
Click to expand...

You forgot:

E. Some say he's doing a heckuva job. :)
 
Clearly, the President is right on target. No straw man whatsoever. If, for example, you oppose warrentless wiretapping, you (meaning mostly democrats) want to allow AlQeda to plot in America using the phone.

Warrent = giving in to terrorists
Presidential Assertion of Authority = protecting America from Islamofacists.

No strawman here...

...With the thoughts i'd be think'n
I could be another Lincoln,
If I only had a brain....
 
My observation of debates on these forums suggests that if the American right let go of their stupid straw dolls they'd have nothing.
 
zakur said:
Bush apologists, I have taken the liberty of typing out your defenses below to save you a little time. Please select from:
Click to expand...

Well, let me take the liberty of linking to a response supporting your first option (that Bush's statements aren't actual strawmen):

http://powerlineblog.com/archives/013465.php

Here's just one example from that post (comments in brackets [] mine to improve clarity):

"[Powerline] Here's another of Ms. Loven's "straw men":

[Loven]Running for re-election against Sen. John Kerry in 2004, Bush frequently used some version of this line to paint his Democratic opponent as weaker in the fight against terrorism: "My opponent and others believe this matter is a matter of intelligence and law enforcement."

[Powerline]Bush probably said that because he actually listened to what Kerry said, unlike, apparently, Ms. Loven:

[Kerry]The war on terror is less -- it is occasionally military, and it will be, and it will continue to be for a long time. ... But it's primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation that requires cooperation around the world -- the very thing this administration is worst at.

[Powerline]Funny, what with Loven's husband having been cited by the Kerry campaign as one of its leading endorsers, you'd think she would have paid more attention to Kerry's speeches."
 
That's not a good refutation. Kerry's statement explicitly includes military action (albeit in a secondary role), while Bush's version implicitly excludes it.
 
What the heck, I'll play.

Last fall, the rhetorical tool became popular with Bush when the debate heated up over when troops would return from Iraq. "Some say perhaps we ought to just pull out of Iraq," he told GOP supporters in October, echoing similar lines from other speeches. "That is foolhardy policy."

Yet even the speediest plan, as advocated by only a few Democrats, suggested not an immediate drawdown, but one over six months. Most Democrats were not even arguing for a specific troop withdrawal timetable.
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Ms. Loven is employing a straw man here herself. Note that the President didn't say immediate, she did. And of course, Rep. Murtha's plan, which did indeed call for a six-month timetable for withdrawal regardless of the consequences, was characterized by the Associated Press (Ms. Loven's employer) thusly: "An influential House Democrat who voted for the Iraq war called Thursday for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, " and by Rep. Murtha himself like so: "I believe before the Iraqi elections, scheduled for mid-December, the Iraqi people and the emerging government must be put on notice: The United States will immediately redeploy--immediately redeploy."
 
mumblethrax said:
That's not a good refutation. Kerry's statement explicitly includes military action (albeit in a secondary role), while Bush's version implicitly excludes it.
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Does it? Is Bush's representation of what Kerry said regarding terrorism being a law enforcement issue actually false? I don't see how, without taking what you think Bush implied to be more important than what he explicitly stated (not a position I'd want to try to defend). Does it neglect some of the nuance that Kerry put in his statement? Perhaps, but that seems pretty secondary to me. The main issue is the primary framework within which each man viewed the problem of terrorism. Bush said he viewed it as a war, Kerry said he viewed it as a law enforcement issue. That both acknowledge a component of the other (Bush isn't going to abandon criminal investigation and prosecution of terrorist suspects, just as Kerry concedes uses for military action) doesn't change this basic difference of opinion. And Bush's statement correctly captures that basic, and real, difference. It is not a strawman.
 
Yes, it does implicitly exclude military action as a consequence of how we process natural language. Inevitably, when challenged on this kind of statement, people will then resort to a critical analysis of the sentence; there's nothing inconsistent about Bush's assertion, because it's logically inclusive. But natural language processing is not logical, and the sentence implies exclusivity. It would be naive to think that rhetoricians don't take advantage of this rift between natural language and logic to present equivocal statements, which happen to be strawmen when interpreted precisely as intended.
 
Incidentally, here's Bush's quote in context:

W said:
My opponent and others believe this matter is a matter of intelligence and law enforcement. I strongly disagree agree. See, that was the attitude we had before September the 11th, after the World Trade Center was attacked in 1993. They thought we could solve it with legal indictments. Some people thought the matter had been solved. But the enemy was plotting and planning and training. They served notice on us, and we're now serving notice on them. We're not going to just serve them with legal papers. We will use every asset at the disposal of the United States government to bring these killers to justice. (Applause.)
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http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/05/20040504-3.html

I think this lends weight to the idea that Bush is implying that Kerry would rely exclusively on intelligent and law enforcement to deal with terrorism. How about you?
 
In light of the recent claims from the FBI agent who arrested Moussaoui, effective use of law enforcement might have stopped 9/11.
 
zakur said:
Bush Using Straw-Man Arguments in Speeches


Bush apologists, I have taken the liberty of typing out your defenses below to save you a little time. Please select from:

A. The examples the writer uses are not really straw man arguments.

B. All politicians do this. Bush is no different from other politicians.

C. Why do you hate America, zakur?

D. All of the above. ;)
Click to expand...

Mephisto said:
You forgot:

E. Some say he's doing a heckuva job. :)
Click to expand...
F. I, for one, welcome our new straw overlords here on Planet X.
 
Perhaps Bush should be more clear about exactly who "they" are when we makes such claims. That way us cynics won't assume he is creating an imaginary enemy in an attempt to bolster his own position.
 
hgc said:
In light of the recent claims from the FBI agent who arrested Moussaoui, effective use of law enforcement might have stopped 9/11.
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The debate over whether Bush's model for fighting terrorism is better than Kerry's model is completely separate from whether or not Bush mischaracterized Kerry's position.
 
KelvinG said:
Perhaps Bush should be more clear about exactly who "they" are when we makes such claims. That way us cynics won't assume he is creating an imaginary enemy in an attempt to bolster his own position.
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Hyperlinks kind of break up the flow of a speech.
 
Ziggurat said:
Hyperlinks kind of break up the flow of a speech.
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Bush's speech have absolutely no flow anyways, so I doub it'll hurt. Perhaps if he eliminated the 5 second pauses and the "uh, uh, uhs" it would help.

An orator he ain't.
 
KelvinG said:
Bush's speech have absolutely no flow anyways, so I doub it'll hurt.
Click to expand...

Until he screws up the address with something like whitehouse dot com instead of whitehouse dot gov, and everyone who follows his speech accidentally ends up on some random midget porn site. Granted, that might get more people to pay attention to his speeches, but I'm not sure that the Bush administration is game for that.
 
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