Research Topic

Was Richard Nixon a good president despite the Watergate Scandal?

-reduced tension between the U.S and U.S.S.R.
-opened dialogue with China
-ended the draft and brought U.S troops home from the Vietnam War
-reduced the number of nuclear weapons between U.S and U.S.S.R
-environmentalist
-cutback funding on health care, education, and social programs for the poor
-clandestinely bombed communists in Cambodia
-high inflation, unemployment rate, and oil prices
-supported a coup in Chile which brought General Augusto Pinochet, a ruthless dicatator, to power

Informal fallacy article

My informal fallacy article, posted below, is an editorial article published in the Washington Post on March 6, 2009. Charles Krauthammer is an eminent writer in the post and has written about politics for many years. The article in itself is not a rhetorical fallacy, however he writes, in his opinion, what seems to be a rhetorical fallacy on the part of Barack Obama. The attended audience are the readers of the Washington Post or those interested in politics and the world. The article touches on pathos because the state of the economy should be a vital concern among all americans and the new administration's actions (or lack of) is something we will take earnestly. Also, there is an appeal to logos when Krauthammer mentions Barack Obama's motivation to bring a better, more refined health care system and a reformation of energy and education. And finally, the purpose of the article was to more or less criticize Obama for telling the American people that universal health care, less of a reliance on foriegn oil, and easier access to college for students is the necessary cure for the financial crisis, something the the author views as a non-sequitur.

Most consider the causes of the financial causes, as Krauthammer alludes to in his article, to a lack of government regulations, greedy CEO's, and irresponsible lending and buying. And the new administration certainly agrees with the list. However, they seemingly only mention the necessity of education, energy, and heath-care reform--three items unrelated to the the cause of the financial debacle. According to the author, it appears that whenever talk occurs about repairing the markets, these are the only items conversed with the American public, causing many to worry about the future of the U.S economy. It is a non-sequitur, according to Krauthammer. The cures offered by the administration to rectify the financial crisis "do not follow" with the causes that got is in the mess in the first place. This rhetorical fallacy, although may certainly help the many Americans without health-care, will not however, abate the high unemployement rate until genuine actions are taken to address the financial crisis.

Informal fallacy article

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March 06, 2009

Deception at Core of Obama Plans

By Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON -- Forget the pork. Forget the waste. Forget the 8,570 earmarks in a bill supported by a president who poses as the scourge of earmarks. Forget the "$2 trillion dollars in savings" that "we have already identified," $1.6 trillion of which President Obama's budget director later admits is the "savings" of not continuing the surge in Iraq until 2019 -- 11 years after George Bush ended it, and eight years after even Bush would have had us out of Iraq completely.

Forget all of this. This is run-of-the-mill budget trickery. True, Obama's tricks come festooned with strings of zeros tacked onto the end. But that's a matter of scale, not principle.

All presidents do that. But few undertake the kind of brazen deception at the heart of Obama's radically transformative economic plan, a rhetorical sleight of hand so smoothly offered that few noticed.

The logic of Obama's address to Congress went like this:

"Our economy did not fall into decline overnight," he averred. Indeed, it all began before the housing crisis. What did we do wrong? We are paying for past sins in three principal areas: energy, health care, and education -- importing too much oil and not finding new sources of energy (as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf?), not reforming health care, and tolerating too many bad schools.

The "day of reckoning" has now arrived. And because "it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we'll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament," Obama has come to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal.

Amazing. As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people.

At the very center of our economic near-depression is a credit bubble, a housing collapse and a systemic failure of the entire banking system. One can come up with a host of causes: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushed by Washington (and greed) into improvident loans, corrupted bond-ratings agencies, insufficient regulation of new and exotic debt instruments, the easy money policy of Alan Greenspan's Fed, irresponsible bankers pushing (and then unloading in packaged loan instruments) highly dubious mortgages, greedy house-flippers, deceitful homebuyers.

The list is long. But the list of causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health care, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy. Nor the lack of college graduates. Indeed, one could perversely make the case that, if anything, the proliferation of overeducated, Gucci-wearing, smart-ass MBAs inventing ever more sophisticated and opaque mathematical models and debt instruments helped get us into this credit catastrophe in the first place.

And yet with our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy. Four months after winning the election, six weeks after his swearing in, Obama has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the banking crisis.

What's going on? "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," said Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. "This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."

Things. Now we know what they are. The markets' recent precipitous decline is a reaction not just to the absence of any plausible bank rescue plan, but also to the suspicion that Obama sees the continuing financial crisis as usefully creating the psychological conditions -- the sense of crisis bordering on fear-itself panic -- for enacting his "Big Bang" agenda to federalize and/or socialize health care, education and energy, the commanding heights of post-industrial society.

Clever politics, but intellectually dishonest to the core. Health, education and energy -- worthy and weighty as they may be -- are not the cause of our financial collapse. And they are not the cure. The fraudulent claim that they are both cause and cure is the rhetorical device by which an ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com