Bush’s Straw-Man Rhetoric

It turns out that radical right-wing pundits and bloggers aren’t the only ones who like to set up straw men just to knock them down. Our Sainted President is quite willing to use that dishonest rhetorical tactic as well:

When the president starts a sentence with “some say” or offers up what “some in Washington” believe, as he is doing more often these days, a rhetorical retort almost assuredly follows.

The device usually is code for Democrats or other White House opponents. In describing what they advocate, Bush often omits an important nuance or substitutes an extreme stance that bears little resemblance to their actual position.

He typically then says he “strongly disagrees” — conveniently knocking down a straw man of his own making.

…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.

“It’s such a phenomenal hole in the national debate that you can have arguments with nonexistent people,” Fields said. “All politicians try to get away with this to a certain extent. What’s striking here is how much this administration rests on a foundation of this kind of stuff.”

It’s easy and tempting to create a caricature of an opponent’s position to argue against, but a dsicerning mind knows that the tactic is essentially dishonest. It relies on a lie, explicit or otherwise, about what the opponent has said. Those who use it — and its use is by no means limited to the right — expose their own inability to engage in truthful, meaningful debate.

Hat tip to MyDD.

UPDATE 3/21/06 16:25: Media Matters notes that, for years, “many AP writers… have simply reported Bush’s misrepresentations of his opponents’ arguments without challenging them.”