Category: Rhetoric

For a week or so, the media has fixated on what I guess counts as an Obama gaffe. At a campaign stop, Obama said the following: If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system… Continue reading The causal ambiguity underlying the “you didn’t build that” controversy

Back in February, a short-term spike in oil prices managed to find itself into the cacophony of stupidity that is right-wing cable and television programming. The sentiments expressed ranged from Obama being a failure because he cannot control oil prices to Obama conspiring to raise oil prices to serve his environmentalist agenda. I had a… Continue reading Remember oil price hysteria?

Nick Hanauer — a wealthy entrepreneur and venture capitalist — has an excellent piece on Bloomberg today addressing the absurdity of the right-wing’s rhetoric of job creation. Conservatives claim that rich people create jobs by using very tortured logic that I will address below. But first, here is Hanauer on the right-wing’s narrative about people… Continue reading Job creator myth revisited

Within political journalism and perhaps the public at large, analysis often proceeds on the assumption that political events have the capacity to swing public opinion. So when things like the death of Osama Bin Laden, the debt-ceiling deal, or the housing crisis happen, reporters contemplate how the public’s reaction will affect voter sentiment. But this… Continue reading What the housing bubble teaches us about political events

The right-wing rhetorical machine has been spinning out the word “job creator” for some time now. Recently, that rhetoric has been ratcheted up as Occupy Wall Street managed to break through and bring attention to the massive economic inequality in the country. It is obvious that the title is just used to replace more descriptive… Continue reading What the hell is a job creator?