Responding to a question about the Israeli/Palestinian peace process at yesterday’s joint press conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, President Bush had this to say:
I readily concede there are skeptics, people who say democracy is not possible in certain societies. But, remember, that was said right after World War II with Japan.
It seems that I have heard this somewhere before. Wait… wait… don’t tell me— it will come to me. Oh right—this is exactly the same answer he gives whenever anyone asks a vaguely critical question about the push toward the January elections in Iraq. For instance, here’s an excerpt from the President’s April 2004 press conference:
Some of the debate really centers around the fact that people don’t believe Iraq can be free; that if you’re Muslim, or perhaps brown-skinned, you can’t be self-governing and free. I strongly disagree with that. I reject that, because I believe that freedom is the deepest need of every human soul, and, if given a chance, the Iraqi people will be not only self-governing, but a stable and free society.
My initial response was, “Wait, who are these ‘people’ who believe this?” It’s a neat rhetorical trick, but that’s about it—a classic straw man argument, in which you mischaracterize your opponent’s argument in order to make it easier to defeat. Aside from a few crazy people, precisely no one is saying that democracy is impossible in some societies, or that people whose skin is brown can’t be self-governing. However, there’s rarely time (or the inclination, apparently) at a press conference to engage in the sort of debate necessary to counter this trick.
There’s something bigger going on here, though. Normally, if you make a bogus argument and I call you on it, you look silly. If I catch you doing the same thing again, and call you on it again, you look even sillier. However, if you just keep on making your bogus argument, after a while, it’s me that starts to sound like a broken record. At some point, I’ll throw up my hands in frustration and probably give up, muttering something along the lines of, “I quit—there’s just no talking to this guy.”
This strategy has proven highly effective and successful for the Bush administration, largely because Democrats, liberals, and progressives have yet to develop an effective counter-strategy. There’s only so many times we can point out that No Child Left Behind has not been adequately funded by the administration’s budgets, or that the Clear Skies initiative actually rolls back the legal framework that has been responsible for 20 years’ of improving air quality, or that the Healthy Forests program opens up previously protected forests to logging companies before we get the inevitable response of “Geez, don’t you guys ever stop complaining?”