Straw man wars and observations

Helene Cooper at the NY Times wrote a piece on Obama's use of straw men and she used the Times formula for being critical of Obama--bash President Bush. After reading it a couple of times I determined it was not worth a post. That was before I saw Jules Crittenden's piece explaining it.

Fascinating “Washington Memo” by NYT’s Helene Cooper slams Obama’s growing use of bogus strawmen, when he goes after people who want to “do nothing,” about economic woes, health care, climate change. (I’d like to raise my straw hand on the climate change one. Do nothing, please. That global case of Von Munchausen Syndrome needs a psychiatrist, not a doctor, because the quack cures now being forced down our throats are a waste of time and money in dire economic times, at best, and in fact a destructive, border-line totalitarian exercise in ideological agenda-pushing based on flawed if not coercively skewed science. I hope that takes some of the straw out of Obama’s argument, Helene.)

But Cooper’s essay is interesting not simply as an example of how the media worm is subtly turning, as it inevitably must on the Obama admin. It is interesting because a good strawman argument apparently can’t be made without the use of strawmen, and because of the way this one studiously avoids, or maybe remains blissfully ignorant of, Obama’s most glaring straw offense to date.

Cooper, noting that strawmen are a time-honored device of political rhetoric, turns to Bush to make her point. But she must have had a hard time scratching up a good example, because for all the supposed rhetorical crimes of the Bush regime, this one gets the slam:

There was much outrage in 2006, for example, when Mr. Bush said that when it came to battling terrorists, “I need members of Congress who understand that you can’t negotiate with these folks,” implying that Democrats backed talks with Al Qaeda. That assertion was promptly, and angrily, disputed by Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts.

It’s almost as though, in order to make her case about strawmen, Cooper needs a strawman. Because with much of the terrorist and terrorism-enabling world … Iran, Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah, for example … the Dems did and do actively favor negotiation. They did so in the Bush era to the point of making their own approaches in defiance of the Bush State Department. It’s true that regarding al-Qaeda the Dems prefered the “law enforcement” approach, which is not exactly negotiation. But they also favored military disengagement and thought we could resolve our problems largely by making everyone like us better.

Think that’s a strawman argument? I refer you to our president’s absurd speech the other day. It’s too bad Cooper skipped that, because Obama was playing an astonishing double-reverse strawman game in that one, quite possibly unprecedented in the scurrilous history of American political chicanery, in which he slammed the supposed abandonment of fundamental American values by the prior administration and its supposedly destructive policies while adopting them as his own. Under a thin veneer of better-likedness. I’d call it a brilliant bit of straw footwork, except that the only people he seems to have fooled is the national press. Even his own base isn’t buying it. And it transcends the traditional, incidental use of strawmen in American political rhetoric. Because in this case, the president has constructed himself a straw tower, and has taken up residence in it.

...

Now I understand why the Cooper piece just did not work. It was trying too hard to excuse Obama's rhetorical excess. Here is the Times formula. If you are praising a Republican like President Bush, you have to throw in a gratuitous slam of President Bush in the same piece. If you are being critical of a Democrat like President Obama, you have to throw in a gratuitous slam of President Bush in the same piece.

What I don't know is if this formula is a way to keep the left wing kooks off their back, or is just a way to protect the Democrat franchise that so many of its writers support. You mostly see the formula in opinion pieces, but critics of the times have been known to suggest that includes many of their "hard news" pieces too.