Rhetorical bait-and-switch

Dan Paden at No Blog of Significance provides a near-textbook example of that hoariest of rhetorical scams, the bait-and-switch.

A few days ago, Paden made the following remark regarding David Neiwert:

Also on display again this week, as it often is, is his incredible double-standard regarding what he calls "eliminationist rhetoric." I’ll readily grant that there are too many inexcusable remarks passing as “humor” from the right — Mr. Neiwert does an excellent job of demonstrating that — but there are at least as many emanating from the left. But when it comes to the left, he plays a different tune: By golly, those crummy remarks from the left — well, it’s all the right wing’s fault. They started it. We only say those things ‘cause those racist right-wingers started it. We’re pure and saintly — unlike them.

Note what Paden is claiming: that the left uses eliminationist rhetoric as often as does the right. We need to be clear on the meaning of the phrase “eliminationist rhetoric”: It encompasses any commentary that suggests, or outright demands, that someone whose political views the speaker does not agree with should be attacked, beaten, imprisoned, or killed. David Neiwert has been relentless in documenting this sort of rhetoric on the right.

(I’ll note in passing that Paden’s claim that Neiwert plays a “different tune” about left-wing rhetoric is purest straw man. Neiwert has never said anything even vaguely resembling what Paden has fantasized.)

In the comments to Paden’s post, I challenged him to document his claim that eliminationist rhetoric is as commonly used by the left as by the right:

David Neiwert provides facts to back up his statements about eliminationist rhetoric. You’ve got nothing.

And now note the startling transformation: Paden suddenly abandons any pretense that he is discussing eliminationist rhetoric, and focuses solely on the vague category of "hostile" remarks from the left:

It annoyed Mr. Meatbrain that I didn’t provide an extensive catalog of hostile rhetoric from the left…

There are a few examples of hostile tone and rhetoric…

Then it occurred to me to see how many hostile leftist quotes I could collect in fifteen minutes.

(all emphasis is mine)

Of the several quotes Paden provides, only one can be said to be eliminationist rhetoric (“Where is Lee Harvey Oswald when you need him?”). Neiwert has spent months discussing and documenting eliminationist rhetoric used by mainstream right-wing pundits. When Paden discovers he can’t really find all that much leftist eliminationist rhetoric on his fishing expedition, he changes his accusation to “hostile leftist quotes” and tries to conflate the two:

My whole point in my aforementioned post was that there was as much hostile, even “eliminationist” rhetoric coming from the left as from the right…

Paden is, quite simply, lying about his original accusation , which dealt only with Neiwert’s view of eliminationist rhetoric:

Also on display again this week, as it often is, is his incredible double-standard regarding what he calls "eliminationist rhetoric."

David Neiwert has documented the use of eliminationist rhetoric by popular and widely-known right-wing commentators over the past several years. Dan Paden will need to collect a similar number of statements from left-wing commentators in the mainstream media before his accusation will hold any water.

Somehow, it does not seem likely that Paden will bother to do what needs to be done to restore his credibility.

UPDATE 05/12/06 21:03 PM EDT: Paden is still tap-dancing, trying desperately to justify his accusation without ever actually producing facts:

Such “defense” as I care to offer is that Mr. Meatbrain’s “beef” with me (Har Har! I just slay myself sometimes…) seems to be that in one post I referred to Mr. Neiwert’s ”...incredible double-standard regarding what he calls ‘eliminationist rhetoric’” without actually providing a count of and links to such comments from both sides of the political aisle, and in this one conflated “eliminationist” with “hostile.” Personally, I thought that when I referred to what Mr. Neiwert calls “eliminationist rhetoric” that that was sufficient indication that I don’t always agree with his opinions; some things that I would call merely hostile, he would call eliminationist and vice versa. The two categories, therefore, do overlap insofar as my complaint with Mr. Neiwert is concerned—at least in my opinion.

Paden is lying yet again. His “two categories” did not even exist in the earlier of his posts — he discussed only Neiwert’s alleged ‘double-standard regarding what he calls “eliminationist rhetoric”’. Paden changed his tune to a denunciation of “hostile leftist quotes” only after he was challenged to substantiate his original accusation, and realized he could not.