A matter of politics…
Everything in politics is a matter of emphasis. That’s neither news nor any great revelation. But Paul Krugman, treats the recent statement by a Bush administration official–”We’re not lying…But it was just a matter of emphasis”–regarding our reason for war with Iraq as if it were revelation.
Arguing for, and implementing, nearly any matter of policy involves emphasizing those aspects of the situation that favor either a particular outcome or a particular faction. The engines of this emphasizing are rhetoric and heresthetics.
Krugman asks (rhetorically? naively?): “[A]ren’t the leaders of a democratic nation supposed to tell their citizens the truth?”
Exactly what is this thing he calls “truth”?
It is the “truth” that the Bush administration wanted, for whatever reasons, to remove Saddam Hussein from power and would use force if necessary to do so. It is the “truth” that this is easier to accomplish in a democratic republic if the citizens, if not the world, agree to the policy. So, from an amoral rhetorical perspective–any rhetoric that works is good rhetoric–the Bush administration’s emphasis gets the job done, i.e. implements policy.
Krugman continues:
One wonders whether most of the public will ever learn that the original case for war has turned out to be false. In fact, my guess is that most Americans believe that we have found W.M.D.’s. Each potential find gets blaring coverage on TV; how many people catch the later announcement–if it is ever announced–that it was a false alarm? It’s a pattern of misinformation that recapitulates the way the war was sold in the first place. Each administration charge against Iraq received prominent coverage; the subsequent debunking did not.
Well, a citizen can read all about it this morning in The New York Times. Krugman lapses into the elitist (and discredited) strong-media theory here, i.e. we all swallow whatever the media feeds us. Although his observations about news coverage are, in my opinion, largely correct, that does not translate into a news vacuum for alternate truths. We citizens are responsible for finding and using politically useful information.
What’s important here is not the war or Krugman; what’s important here is the concept of emphasis, its relation to rhetoric and heresthetics, and its use in a democratic republic to create and implement policy. This kind of thing happens every day. It goes by another name: politics.
“Well, a citizen can read all about it this morning in The New York Times. Krugman lapses into the elitist (and discredited) strong-media theory here, i.e. we all swallow whatever the media feeds us.”
Are you sure you are interpreting that correctly? I got that he was *emphasizing* (groan) that we are seeing one of the hallmarks of propoganda-repetition.
Are you sure you are interpreting that correctly? I got that he was *emphasizing* (groan) that we are seeing one of the hallmarks of propoganda-repetition.
Are you sure you are interpreting that correctly? I got that he was *emphasizing* (groan) that we are seeing one of the hallmarks of propoganda-repetition.
Perhaps you have the term ready off the top of your head, but what is it called when you intentionally mis-interpret the argument and attack the mis-interpretation, instead of the original argument? Is that what you did here?
“knocking down a straw man” might be the expression Barney Grumble is casting about for.
I don’t think the administration was insincere in expressing concerns about Saddam and WMD. Their problem was that their real concern was that Saddam would acquire new WMD after inspections were terminated and sanctions ended: “giving inspections time to work” would have been disastrous, from the administration’s POV.
The hell of it is…they were right. Give Saddam a clean bill of health, and 60 Billion a year in oil revenues, and Iraq would go nuclear. Who can doubt it?
I don’t deal in a concept of interpreting “correctly,” although I think it’s possible to be so off base as to interpret absurdly.
I’m not trying to mis-interpret. That’s not to say that I didn’t. Further, my message, like Krugman’s, has a rhetorical intent. It suits my purposes to interpret it as I did to make my point about empahsis and politics. Krugman’s column merely provides an opportunity.
For some reason, this Krugman column has drawn more fire than usual. So far my favorite fisking of this column is Dave Hogberg’s from Cornfield Commentary (www.davidhogberg.blogspot.com/) who asks”Is Krugman the Noam Chomsky of Economics?” Dave would know!!