Insults & Logical Fallacies

“A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally.” - Oscar Wilde quotes

This past month we’ve seen a rare event, the White House attacking the integrity and character of an American Citizen.

"It would be charitable to say he doubled down on what he said in January in ... wishing and hoping for economic failure in this country” – White House spokesman Robert Gibbs speaking about Rush Limbaugh

"This notion that I want the president to fail, folks -- this shows you a sign of the problem we've got. ... That's nothing more than common sense. And to not be able to say it? Why in the world do I want what we just described -- rampant government growth, indebtedness? ... What possibly is in this that any of us want to succeed?" – Rush Limbaugh

I bring this up not because of the politics but because of the “spin” at work here. In college I spent six years studying aspects of logic and the verbal exchanges with Rush demonstate two common logical fallicies.

The White House comments could be classifed as a straw-man argument. “One that misrepresents a position in order to make it appear weaker than it actually is, refutes this misrepresentation of the position, and then concludes that the real position has been refuted.” In this case, Rush is saying he disagrees with the President’s policy on the economic recovery and hopes that the policy fails. The White House interprets this as equivalent to ”hoping for economic failure in this country” because in minds of the White House staff, their policy and economic recovery are one and the same. They overlook the possibility that the country might recover without (or even despite) the changes they propose.

The White House statement also distorts Rush’s statement in a second way by saying he desires “economic failure”. This overlooks the fact that we are already in a state of “economic failure”. I suspect Rush is saying that he hopes the economy does not improve under the Obama plan, because if it does, the Obama policy changes will become set in concrete for decades to come much like the changes made by FDR.

"We're not quitting. We are not giving up. The country is too important.
[Applause] There are certain realities. We don't have the votes in Capitol Hill
to stop what's going to happen. What we can do is slow it down, procedure,
parliamentary procedures, slow it down and do the best we can to inform the
American people of what's really on the horizon. I know it's going to be
tough." - Rush

If you believe that the cure is worse than the disease then you might sympathize with the opinion that,

"President Obama, your agenda is not new. It's not change, and it's not hope. Spending a nation into generational debt is not an act of compassion." -Rush

To avoid an honest discussion on the long-term side effects of the economic cure, the White House and even “conservative” politicians like the Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele have resorted to a second common logical fallacy, the ad hominem attack. This works as follows:

Source A makes claim X
There is something objectionable about Source A
Therefore claim X is false

When Michael Steele called Limbaugh an "entertainer" whose show is "incendiary" and "ugly" he was trying to shoot the messenger. By discrediting the speaker, one hopes to sweep what was said under the rug, to bury it as unworthy of consideration because the speaker is unworthy in some way. Attacking Rush the “entertainer” does not falsify his beliefs. Those need to be addressed directly if one wishes to refute them.

Bottom Line

I generally try to avoid speeches made by politicians today of any party. There is so much “spin”, so much deception, fact distortion, red herrings, straw-men, etc that there is rarely any real factual content left to digest. Try to get a copy of a SciFi book from 1988 call David’s Sling by Marc Stiegler. The opening chapters of the book describe an institute dedicated to training people to see past the lies in advertising, political speeches, etc. If only this were true.