Rhetoric

Wow. It never ceases to amaze me how people will fall for rhetorical tricks and manipulations as long as it's used by someone they already agree with. Are there so very few folks that can listen to all sides in our political cultural landscape and use the skills they were taught to decode? Oh, wait, that's right, RHETORIC ISN'T TAUGHT.

What am I talking about?

Well, how about the President saying the trite, tired line "if we save even one life,.. blah blah blah?" Pretty much every speech he has made about this is so filled with junk that any 9th grader should be able to catch, but we live in the age of the "low information voter."

A friend on Facebook shared this WSJ article about Lincoln's use of rhetoric. When will someone decode Obama's? Oh wait, it happens all the time. Unfortunately, my Facebook friends that think he's so wonderful don't read those stories.

Also, two separate posts over on that social network really got my hackles up: one was based on the premise that if a bunch of slave owning, women-right-denying white founders said we should have guns, well, obviously they were wrong. The other was crap history that the 2nd amendment was all about keeping slaves and protecting the slave patrols' status as "militia." I couldn't even compose a sentence in reply, nor would I, because if you believe that, you are beyond reason.