Tag Archives: rhetoric

Borrowing a Phrase–Obama–Dedicated to All Our Allies

by

Sarah Palin Responds to Tucson Shooting

by

Obama Making a Game of Our Security

by

AllahPundit calls Obama on his slight of hand rhetoric, setting up “straw men” as choices. Obama talks about rejecting “false choices” while feeding us a line of false choices. The Magic is wearing thin!

This time President Obama tries shell game manipulations at the Naval Academy:

“When America strays from our values, it not only undermines the rule of law, it alienates us from our allies, it energizes our adversaries and it endangers our national security and the lives of our troops,” Obama said. “So as Americans, we reject the false choice between our security and our ideals. We can and we must and we will protect both.”

The Pundit points out the false choices:

The notion that our war policies have alienated the world is pathetic, given the track record of the rest of the world, especially our enemies. The notion that straying from Obama’s perception of American ideals energizes our enemies is belied by the history of increasingly brazen terror attacks during the Clinton administration and culminating in the 9/11 attack. Jihadis — and the Left — may use Guantanamo Bay and enhanced interrogation for propaganda purposes, but the jihadis will always have a grievance du jour — as evidenced by the fact that two of the 9/11 terrorists said on videotape that their actions were inspired by an urge to avenge the suffering of Muslims in Bosnia and Chechnya. Jihadis are energized when their attacks succeed, not when they are preempted. The Left is energized by photos of detainee abuse, but suppresses footage of jihadi beheadings or people plummeting from the World Trade Canter.

I, for one, am glad AllahPundit has the eye to spot the slight of hand,  for our choices in a dangerous world should not be the shell game Obama is making it.

Read it all here.

“Torture” & Rhetorical One-Up-Manship

by

Thomas Sowell calls “childish” and “fatuous” the positions taken on “torture,” inorder to appear to be morally one-up on the other side.  Regardless of what they say, these people would actually act quite differently if their butts were at stake. According to Sowell:

There is a big difference between being ponderous and being serious. It is scary when the President of the United States is not being serious about matters of life and death, saying that there are “other ways” of getting information from terrorists.

Maybe this is a step up from the previous talking point that “torture” had not gotten any important information out of terrorists. Only after this had been shown to be a flat-out lie did Barack Obama shift his rhetoric to the lame assertion that unspecified “other ways” could have been used.

For a man whose whole life has been based on style rather than substance, on rhetoric rather than reality, perhaps nothing better could have been expected. But that the media and the public would have become so mesmerized by the Obama cult that they could not see through this to think of their own survival, or that of this nation, is truly a chilling thought.

When we look back at history, it is amazing what foolish and even childish things people said and did on the eve of a catastrophe about to consume them. In 1938, with Hitler preparing to unleash a war in which tens of millions of men, women and children would be slaughtered, the play that was the biggest hit on the Paris stage was a play about French and German reconciliation, and a French pacifist that year dedicated his book to Adolf Hitler.

If we could fight and win wars with words, our writers and poets would man the front lines with notepads and computers, however flesh and blood heroes are still our first defense and President’s are still compelled to command soldiers and protect citizen with more than words and lofty thoughts.

Thomas Sowell like Obama speaks of Winston Churchill. Sowell notes that the reason Churchill didn’t torture prisioners of war while bombs were falling on London was that these men were ordinary soldiers captured in war and covered by the Geneva convention. They also didn’t know anything that would have kept London from being bombed. Terrorists with life-saving information is another category entirely.  Sowell concludes:

The left has long confused physical parallels with moral parallels. But when a criminal shoots at a policeman and the policeman shoots back, physical equivalence is not moral equivalence. And what American intelligence agents have done to captured terrorists is not even physical equivalence.

If we have reached the point where we cannot be bothered to think beyond rhetoric or to make moral distinctions, then we have reached the point where our own survival in an increasingly dangerous world of nuclear proliferation can no longer be taken for granted.

Read Thomas Sowell here and here.