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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (9637)	9/28/2003 11:45:22 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793658

This from your article is amusing.< I was most interested in this part: <<How did so many Americans arrive at these beliefs? For some, it was no doubt just the feeling that one evil Middle Easterner is the same as the next, and since Saddam and Osama bin Laden are both bad guys, they must be in cahoots. No one in the administration ever said, "Saddam helped plan Sept. 11," but the rhetoric before and after the war contained innumerable suggestions to that effect. It is hard to believe that the White House was unaware that if the words "Saddam Hussein" and "Sept. 11" were mentioned in the same sentence or the same paragraph, people would not make the link on their own. This is an example of what scholars of rhetoric call enthymematic argumentation. In an enthymeme, the speaker builds an argument with one element removed, leading listeners to fill in the missing piece. On May 1, speaking from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, President Bush said, "The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11th, 2001, and still goes on. . . . With those attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States. And war is what they got." This is classic enthymematic argumentation: We were attacked on Sept. 11, so we went to war against Iraq. The missing piece of the argument -- "Saddam was involved in 9/11" -- didn't have to be said aloud for those listening to assimilate its message. >> Not that I think for a moment that Bush sat there in the oval office and said "Let's go with the enthymematic argumentation approach on this one." (I would have giggled over how he fractured it if he had, in fact, said it, though.) But it's an intriguing way to look at the phenomenon in retrospect.