Emotion trumps logic - heraldblog

Emotion trumps logic

One key element of Bush's re-election is that his party has been successful at building a narrative that explains The War Against Terror, including the misguided invasion of Iraq. Nevermind the narrative is more full of logical inconsistencies and flat out fallacies than an Ed Wood script. Emotion trumps logic. Appeals to logic constitute only one of the three forms of classical rhetoric (or tools of persuasion). But not everybody studied rhetoric in college, and not everybody voted for Kerry. There's a Venn diagram floating around in that last sentence, and I'll leave it to you to draw it.

Victor Davis Hanson lays out the standard GOP narrative on his website, and it's worth a read, if only to remind ourselves that we as liberals and progressives need to overcome. Hanson thinks Bush will be judge favorably by history, because all wars are nasty and brutish and all great war leaders make mistakes. How convenient.
We have come too far and too many have died to cease or even pause. In the name of the dead Americans, those lost of the Coalition, and the resolute Iraqis who were butchered by both Saddam and then by the Islamic fascists, let the January election proceed as promised. If Bill Clinton could run America with 43 percent of the popular vote in 1992, if Lincoln could conduct a war after receiving 40 percent in 1860, and if the Supreme Court could adjudicate the electoral mess of 2000, so then the Kurds and the Shiites, if need be, can hold elections in Iraq with participation of 70 percent of the people. As for the Muslim clerics, Saddamites, and al Qaedists of the Sunni triangle, rest assured that there will be elections and you shall all end up on the wrong side of history. How absurd it is that the Sunni Triangle is the heart of an insurrection that feeds off either subsidy, appeasement, or the indifference of its citizenry, only then to plead that its own malfeasance should earn special dispensation from others who chose hard work and sacrifice and the chance for democratic law. Let them participate in history or watch it steamroll by from the sidelines — but let them not stop it.
It's a stirring call to action, unaffected by reality, history, or even common sense. But stirring enough to carry Bush to victory. And for Bush to come out on top, Iraq has only to seem better off after the elections. Forget objective measures - only losers bother to keep score. Could anything be worse than Saddam? Even if another brutal theocracy grows in place of Saddam's mass graves, at least Hanson and other purveyors of the long view can point to the dark years of rape rooms and plastic shredders, and the critics will have to shut up.

This is the box that Democrats find themselves in. They are no longer running against Bush, or John Ashcroft, or recession. They are running away from Saddam, and they further they get from the Butcher of Baghdad, the closer they are drawn to Bush.

5.12.04 00:51

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john / Website (5.12.04 01:29)
You've highlighted my problem: I was a rhetoric major and voted for Kerry! VDH continues to illustrat the Bush's m.o.---if reality isn't in your favor, just make some shit up and call it reality.

(5.12.04 04:53)
That's what Eleanor Roosevelt was just telling me the other day!