{"id":47,"date":"2004-09-16T16:51:16","date_gmt":"2004-09-16T20:51:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=47"},"modified":"2005-02-12T18:17:24","modified_gmt":"2005-02-12T22:17:24","slug":"bring-out-your-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=47","title":{"rendered":"Bring Out Your Dead"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Washington Post 09\/16\/04):<\/a> George Will\u2019s diagnosis of a lethal \u201ccapitol plague\u201d that afflicts northeastern Senators is a bit premature. The 2004 election has not taken place, so it\u2019s a little early to bring out the dead, unless, of course, you try to club them to death first. Will attempts this self-confirming diagnosis of Kerry\u2019s candidacy in a variety of unrelated ways. Among these the most noteworthy for our purposes\u2013and the only ones we\u2019ll take the time to comment on\u2013are the following: a shallow analysis of two of Kerry\u2019s stump speeches and a hopelessly misdirected discussion of two of Kerry\u2019s votes as a Senator. <\/p>\n

First the stump speeches:<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd the Northeastern senator at least went to the border region, to the banks of the Ohio River, for yet another “major” speech clarifying his position(s) on Iraq. John Kerry chose the Cincinnati venue where in October 2002 President Bush made his case for using against Iraq the force that Kerry voted to authorize. In Cincinnati, Kerry complained there was \u2018$200 billion for Iraq, but they tell us we can’t afford after-school programs.\u2019\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What the Weekly Standard and Monday Night Football commentators achieve with the rhetorically effective but semantically empty \u201cflip-flop\u201d talking point, Will achieves with a typographical innuendo (\u201cposition(s)\u201d) and a subordinate clause (\u201c[which] Kerry voted to authorize\u201d). But amid these grammatical insinuations lies an even more clever and sinister device: the imputed false dilemma (and hence straw man). To underline the ridiculousness of Kerry\u2019s remark (in this context-free formulation of it), Will imagines a response from Bush in which the former Governor from the Southwest logically outmaneuvers the Senator from the Northeast:<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018Oh, so that<\/em> is the problem. Why didn’t you say so sooner? In the interest of wartime unity, I will support adding to the current $1 billion spent on after-school programs an additional $1.5 billion — the amount you liberals say is needed. Now<\/em>, senator, will you flip back to where you were 13 months ago when, talking about funding for the war, you said, we should ‘increase it’ and ‘by whatever number of billions of dollars it takes to win'”?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This would be devastating to Kerry\u2019s silly dilemma\u2013it\u2019s either 200 billion for Iraq (n.b., Kerry\u2019s claim is actually false) or 1.5 billion for after-school programs\u2013if only it were something approaching a fair reading of Kerry\u2019s position. The quotation Will cites doesn\u2019t suggest anything along the lines of the false dilemma he and the imaginary Bush are defeating. On a more honest and charitable reading, it suggests rather that Kerry believes the priorities of the Bush administration to be worthy of criticism. <\/p>\n

But there\u2019s more rhetorical trickery here. Will observes:<\/p>\n

\u201cKerry might then have, as liberals are wont to do, upped the ante. While the nation was reeling from the horrors of Beslan and Baghdad, he promised a North Carolina audience that as president he would create a “Department of Wellness” to deal with problems such as house mold.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The odd Mooresque juxtaposition (cf. \u201cNow watch this drive\u201d) of these three things asks us to conclude that Kerry is primarily concerned with matters wholly peripheral to the grave tasks that face the President of the United States. But we can hardly believe that Kerry\u2019s response to the horrors of Beslan and the chaos of Iraq was to combat household mold. Will\u2019s editing of the intellectual footage of the campaign trail would make Michael Moore\u2019s head spin.<\/p>\n

Turning his attention from the hustings to the Senate, Will indirectly claims that Kerry\u2019s motivation for two key Senate votes has nothing to do with reasons or arguments: <\/p>\n

\u201cBetter to talk about that menace [i.e., the mold] than about those two votes he cast that seem to have been equally insincere. One authorized the use of force against Iraq. The second opposed $87 billion to fund coping with the consequences of force having been used. Kerry can say nothing in defense of the first vote that does not offend the intense Democratic activists who are disgusted by it. And he can say nothing in defense of the second vote — his genuflection to those activists, made when Howard Dean was their pinup — without offending an American majority.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Couched in the language of metapolitical analysis (\u201cbetter to talk\u201d), we can isolate the fairly obvious ad hominem attack on Kerry\u2019s political motivations for his votes. No doubt there are political motivations<\/em> for Kerry\u2019s votes, as there are political motivations for anyone\u2019s votes, whether this means the reasons given for the votes are insincere is another matter entirely, and one which, by the way, is very difficult to establish. Charity might suggest believing the reasons offered in the absence of countervailing evidence (of which we have nothing of the sort here). At the very least, Will might consider Kerry\u2019s reasons for voting the way he did. For in the end, they may not be good reasons at all, and Will might have a stronger argument. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Washington Post 09\/16\/04): George Will\u2019s diagnosis of a lethal \u201ccapitol plague\u201d that afflicts northeastern Senators is a bit premature. The 2004 election has not taken place, so it\u2019s a little early to bring out the dead, unless, of course, you try to club them to death first. Will attempts this self-confirming diagnosis of Kerry\u2019s candidacy … Continue reading Bring Out Your Dead<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,2,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-will","category-op-ed-writers","category-straw-man"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}