{"id":5197,"date":"2017-04-03T09:30:17","date_gmt":"2017-04-03T14:30:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=5197"},"modified":"2017-04-03T09:30:17","modified_gmt":"2017-04-03T14:30:17","slug":"tis-but-a-scratch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=5197","title":{"rendered":"&#8216;Tis but a scratch"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Monty Python - The Black Knight - Tis But A Scratch\" width=\"474\" height=\"356\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ZmInkxbvlCs?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>When the Black Knight gets his left arm chopped off in the battle with King Arthur, he shrugs, &#8220;Tis but a scratch.&#8221;\u00c2\u00a0 He continues fighting, and he loses his right arm.\u00c2\u00a0 &#8220;Just a flesh wound.&#8221;\u00c2\u00a0 Eventually, he&#8217;s had all his limbs hacked off, and he calls out to Arthur, who has spared his life (such as it is, now), and leaving.\u00c2\u00a0 &#8220;Ooooohhh&#8230; I see&#8230; running way!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>This downplayer strategy for challenges works only when the evidence of the situation isn&#8217;t clear.\u00c2\u00a0 And so in sports, one can&#8217;t be a big braggart when the L&#8217;s outnumber the W&#8217;s, for example.\u00c2\u00a0 But it seems that in politics (and perhaps business?) there&#8217;s just enough grey for big talk to cover difficulties.<\/p>\n<p>In a recent interview with the<a href=\"https:\/\/www.ft.com\/content\/9ae777ea-17ac-11e7-a53d-df09f373be87\"> Financial Times<\/a> (which is behind a paywall, so a summary on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.politico.com\/story\/2017\/04\/trump-obamacare-repeal-236799\">Politico<\/a>), Trump responds to questions about his difficulties with passing health care reform (i.e., &#8220;repealing and replacing Obamacare&#8221;).\u00c2\u00a0 Here&#8217;s his reply:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px\"><strong>Yeah, I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t lose.<\/strong> <strong>I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t like to lose.<\/strong> But that wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t a definitive day. . .\u00c2\u00a0 There was no reason to take a vote. I said, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcDon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t take a vote,\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 and we will see what happens,. . . . But one way or the other, I promised the people great health care. <strong>We are going to have great health care in this country. Now, it will be in one form or another.<\/strong> It will be a repeal and replace of Obamacare which is the deal that is being negotiated now.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Two things.\u00c2\u00a0 #1.\u00c2\u00a0 That you don&#8217;t like to lose isn&#8217;t a piece of evidence that shows that you don&#8217;t lose.\u00c2\u00a0 Moreover, saying that the day wasn&#8217;t &#8216;definitive&#8217; is a strange point &#8212; perhaps a way of re-casting a loss as something equivocal.\u00c2\u00a0 Perhaps what the President counts as a loss is a total loss, like having it go to a vote, nobody votes for it, and his pants fall down on TV.\u00c2\u00a0 Seriously, who does this guy think he is, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=yfAeMtcURg0\">Baghdad Bob<\/a>?<\/p>\n<p>#2.\u00c2\u00a0 Notice that the goalposts have moved here.\u00c2\u00a0 And with a kind of vague notion of what success will be.\u00c2\u00a0 &#8220;&#8230; one form or another.&#8221;\u00c2\u00a0 Sure, if you&#8217;ve got a well-stated goal like that, you&#8217;re sure to succeed.\u00c2\u00a0 The only more self-serving program would be to define success <em>after<\/em> the enterprise.<\/p>\n<p>The important thing about lines of argument like this is that they are not packaged for the reporters who interview Trump or for his opposition, those who have critical views of the man and his policies.\u00c2\u00a0 Rather, they are designed for his preferred audience &#8212; they function as a way of re-casting the dialectical situation for those who are his, well&#8230; fans.\u00c2\u00a0 We&#8217;ve had a few discussions of the role of <strong>onlooking audience<\/strong> here at the NS, and I think that it&#8217;s at play here.\u00c2\u00a0 For sure refusing to call the miss with health care a &#8216;loss&#8217; looks like more intransigence to many of us, but we are not the ones DT is talking to.\u00c2\u00a0 Just like when you see a straw man of a view and you see it clearly as a straw man, you find that you were not the target audience for those arguments.\u00c2\u00a0 Who are the folks targeted?\u00c2\u00a0 Folks who are looking for something to undermine the going story that the White House is floundering, that the President is a foopdoodle in charge of a group of people who, when they try to write legislation, find that they can only turn out raggabrash.\u00c2\u00a0 Nothing like standing in front of a flaming pile of tires and diapers and saying, &#8220;Nothing to see here&#8230; everything&#8217;s going according to plan.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When the Black Knight gets his left arm chopped off in the battle with King Arthur, he shrugs, &#8220;Tis but a scratch.&#8221;\u00c2\u00a0 He continues fighting, and he loses his right arm.\u00c2\u00a0 &#8220;Just a flesh wound.&#8221;\u00c2\u00a0 Eventually, he&#8217;s had all his limbs hacked off, and he calls out to Arthur, who has spared his life (such &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=5197\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">&#8216;Tis but a scratch<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2157,2156,2061],"class_list":["post-5197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-onlooking-audience","tag-tis-but-a-scratch","tag-trump"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5197","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\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5197"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5198,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5197\/revisions\/5198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}