Well, and the fact that Your Humble Blogger has taken a nice long sabbatical from analyzing political rhetoric must be nice and obvious to Gentle Readers all, and perhaps it’s as much of a relief to y’all as it is to me. It’s a bad time to care about political rhetoric in this country, not only because so much of it is so bad, but because of the reliance of the party in power on a very few very simple tricks to distract us from talking about the subject of the conversation. The successful reliance thereon. And our cultural willingness to be distracted.\n
Take, for instance, the current controversy, if we can call it that, about ... well the controversy appears to be about whether it was appropriate for some retired military brass to publicly criticize the civilian oversight of the military, specifically asking that Secretary Rumsfeld be replaced. Yesterday’s editorial The Generals’ Revolt<\/a> in the Washington Post said that the criticism “threatens the essential democratic principle of military subordination to civilian control.” David Broder, on the same page, said President Bush should Listen to the Brass<\/a>. E.J. Dionne talks further about the Roots of the Uprising<\/a>, talking about Our Former President’s attempt to make the military more inclusive, and the public opposition to that policy. In today’s Post, Melvin R. Laird and Robert E. Pursley ask Why Are They Speaking Up Now?<\/a> In Blogovia, I noticed a well-written note by Pat Lang with the incredulous title Retired Soldiers Should Not Criticize?<\/a>\n Have you noticed it? You see, we begin by asking, in a time of war, when we are occupying one nation and considering attacking another next door to it, whether we want to stick with our current leadership or change it. Within a day or two we are asking under what circumstances retired brass should publicly criticize the civilian leaders. While those articles do devote some space to the merits of the original issue, the bulk of it (and the headlines, which are important as well) is about the limits of discourse. Meanwhile, the leadership has weathered the political storm, and evaded serious public scrutiny once more.\n Now, this is distressing to me for two reasons. Well, two as a student of rhetoric; it would be far more distressing to me as a citizen if I thought that there was some chance that a replacement for Secretary Rumsfeld would be independent-minded, capable, far-seeing, thoughtful, able to keep the confidence of both Our Only President and the military leadership, articulate, perceptive, and destined to lead us to the Land of the Eternal Sabbath. Honestly, though, I’ve gone beyond caring whether Secretary Rumsfeld remains in charge of the Deparment of Preventative Defense for the next three years. Even that, even the subject of the conversation, seems to be to be far from the real point of the conversation.\n However, as someone who is fascinated by techniques of argument, I find it tedious to have the same damn technique put over again and again on us rubes. I mean, we discover that the administration has been wiretapping Americans without warrants, and we discuss whether the information should have been published. We discover that Our Only President has “declassified” information to be given to one reporter in order to further a political agenda and discuss whether it was “a good leak”. When a Congressman introduces a resolution to change the conduct and aims of the war, we discuss whether such a resolution is a “stab in the back.” Now, I’m not saying that my Party has never used this particular trick, or that I would never condone the use of this particular trick. I’m saying that I’m tired of it. Yes, it works. There are lots of things that work. I’m bored with this one. Can we go back to innuendo and smear? Or, please, to stirring emotional appeals to our better natures? I’m not asking that politics be conducted cleanly, I’m just sick of the tedious twisting of the subject of every political conversation from the subject of the conversation to the conversation itself.\n And then, you see, the other reason I’m distressed by this is that the conversation about the conversation, the discussion of the limits of the discussion, is in fact quite important. I would, under somewhat different circumstances, be clamoring for us to discuss, as openly and clearly as we can, what we think we can talk about and what we can’t. I think, in particular, this matter of the relationship between the military, the civilian oversight, and the civilian retired brass is a tricky and fraught one, and I find some of the arguments on either side compelling. The matter of civilian oversight of the military is terribly important, actually as central to the American project as the ballot and the bench, and I think we have let our eyes drift from the prize to a dangerous extent. On the other hand, if we have limited resources, and the Lord knows Your Humble Blogger has limited resources this week, perhaps we should devote them to discussing whether we have done well in Iraq, are doing well, will do well, and whether we will do well in Iran. Because, you know, that, too is important.\n chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek<\/I>, Well, and the fact that Your Humble Blogger has taken a nice long sabbatical from analyzing political rhetoric must be nice and obvious to Gentle Readers all, and perhaps it\u2019s as much of a relief to y\u2019all as it is…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10193"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10193\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17732,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10193\/revisions\/17732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"