Thursday, November 27, 2008

Melanie Phillips dissected

rhetorically speaking... has a nice posting on the unique logic used by the Daily Mail columnist:
Unlike lesser practitioners of the art, Phillips doesn't ignore contradictory or inconvenient evidence. Rather, she incorporates such material as the central proof of whatever she's arguing.
As an example of this the blog quotes yesterday's piece for the Spectator website:
For sure, [Obama] has made some solid and reassuring appointments, such as his Treasury team. But did anyone really believe that a radical president would appoint obvious radicals to key roles in his administration? Maybe he really was a centrist all along. But if not, the one thing Obama is not going to do is torpedo his presidency at the very start by displaying a radical bent.
In other words, "Obama's failure to behave like a crazy radical is in fact proof that he is a crazy radical."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think Melanie has mental health problems

Stan Moss said...

Dunno if she's mental, but she's certainly very good at working herself up. On the Baby P case she'd have put good old Reagan (from The Exorcist, that is) to shame... This is what my 'blogmate' Claude wrote about it on Hagley Road to Ladywood.

http://mymarilyn.blogspot.com/2008/11/melanie-phillips-on-baby-p.html