Obama “artfully dishonest”
I noticed this, too, during Obama’s press conference: the setting up of another straw man. He slipped it in so smoothly it was easy to miss. But that’s his modus operandi.
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
I wrote this at Beldar a few minutes ago.
“There is a level of dishonesty inherent in BO that exceeds anything I’ve ever seen in politics. The Clintons, Nixon, and others told a lot of lies, but there was usually some aspect of the falsehood that was tangentially grounded in reality. Obama just starts off in an alternate reality. He tells falsehoods on top of falsehoods.”
With BO, you almost don’t know where to start. Everything he says proceeds from falsehood.
And he does it so smoothly. Here’s an excellent summary of the Art of Obama:
He is simply intellectually dishonest. He is the master of the False Choice (pass the stimulus or do nothing & let the economy “tank”; socialize health care or “stand pat” — he said that last night), the Straw Man (the approach of putting moral “dogma” above “science”), the Scapegoat (those at the “commanding heights of our economy” (preface to his Budget) and the sly Non Sequitur (the breathtaking argument that to revive our economy and control spending, the government must take over health care and energy and expand federal spending on education). He deploys them in every argument he makes.
— Andrew Brehm
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2009/03/023160.php
People fall for Obama because they fall for his style. Those, who attend to his content and pry it apart, notice all the sneaky tricks that go into his persuasion.
Here’s a guy, Garth Risk Hallberg, who takes a sentence from an Obama press conference last month, diagrams it 7th grade style, then gushes over the “basic lucidity,” “analytical ambition,” and “elegant balance” he finds within.
http://www.themillionsblog.com/2009/02/diagramming-obama-sentence.html
Garth makes no attempt to parse the passage for meaning, other than to note that it is “certainly possible – to dismiss this sentence as a platitudinous non-answer.”
This is, of course, the bang-on correct analysis.
However, that’s impossible since it’s Obama we’re talking about. So Garth’s mind deflects itself from the unpleasant reality and concludes with a non-sequitur: “But to underrate the subtlety and appeal of Obama the communicator is to be out of touch with Americans’ hunger to be addressed as adults.” Then he throws in a couple obligatory Bush bashes and Garth is gone, job well-done.
“…some people said….” Very Nixonian, IMHO. Attribute statements to “some people” and then rebut them to your own benefit. Of course, “some people” are never identified. Nixon: “There are some people who say my opponent is a Commie-loving stinking liar, adulterer, homosexual traitor, but, I, of course, would never say such a thing.” But, I never feared Nixon as much as I fear what Obama could do this this country over time.
Stan, I think that Obama is not a different item than the Clintons and other politicians, but the same phenomenon magnified. You touch on it nicely with your reference to starting points of reality. Clinton had been steeped in liberal platitudes, but this had been tempered by his actually governing a state. Barack starts from, as you note, a belief-system a step farther removed from reality. He has spent his life with people who believe as he does. His version of the recalcitrance of reality are the purely political struggles needed to make it look as if things are being done.
Yet to politicians of such unreality, the appearance of things being done is no different than actual accomplishments. They can maintain their unreality because they are truly unable to see the difference. This is the Obama world – if politicians have addressed a problem properly, it is therefore improving. The actual experience of the people is not noticed.
He is dangerous because he believes that wishes are horses, and is surrounded by those who agree.
That said, it would not shock me to ultimately discover that he is a chameleon.
Being able to lie in a clever manner seems to be something that those on the Left admire.
To me, a lie is a lie… 😡