I have no idea why articles like these get published.

Really?

I know! I know! Obama (for the most part) is a difficult guy to target in the usual Repug manner (innuendo and smearing) in large part because of his race/background.

They can't use the N-word (or any "code" words the unreconstructed types use) for fear of a serious backlash (see Trent Lott.) They can't beat him over the head with the accusations of being a limo lib because he was raised by a single mom (another Repug bugaboo) and went to the best schools due to his own efforts and abilities. Finally, I suspect that they've tried to do oppo research on him and can't find much on Barack or his family. So all the right is left with is the "nah-nah pooh-pooh" nitpicky bitchy comments and observations.

I have no idea why articles like these get published.

Neither do I. But perhaps that explains why the NYT et al are declining in readership, revenues, and reality based reportage. . .

I wish Steve Bennen would stop writing these posts in French. It's completely obnoxious. I mean, wouldn't this read just as well in English: "It's just a bizarre case against the president. The article accuses Obama of using straw men, and then points to examples proving the opposite."

Give the right credit for at least trying to think.

It's like Samuel Johnson's point about a dog walking on its hind legs: "It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."

I have no idea why articles like these get published.

Results-oriented journalism. The pre-conceived conclusion is that Democrats are Just Like Republicans, the facts are arranged (or ignored) to fit that conclusion.

I failed a journalism class in college. Today, think if I tried again, based on today's high standards in the field of journalism, I would not only get an A+ but have multiple job offers upon completion of the course.

I can truly never tell if these "reporters" simply don't understand basic terminology or just don't read what they wrote. I suppose it is a choice between dumb or lazy.

It's an interesting feat of rhetorical Jujutsu. I think they are probably correct that these share a distinguishing feature of straw men arguments: extraordinarily weak and easy to disprove arguments.

The real story, of course, is that the President's critics are attempting to use these as if they are good faith rebuttals, then complaining when he answers them that these arguments are weak and foolish. So, really, they're just indicting themselves.

If these are true straw men, the obvious answer would be to demonstrate the real critiques of his policies. The fact that they don't (and can't) makes this point unsustainable.

But Obama realizes he's not engaging in good faith debate, so he's vigorously going after false points he know people might accept as true if unchallenged.

That's called being honest.

for the hard core progressives amoung us (me) and the hard core pragmatics among us (me), this is why i am ok with a luke warm liberal agenda. Look at the utter craptacular stuff said about this guy and he is not even that threatening to the established order. Were he trying to repeal DADT and allow for federal recognition of gay marriage (the right thing to do), and were he going after single payer (the right thing to do) and if he were pushing for an absulte end to our two front wars (the right thing to do), this guy would be villified in a way that would make any reform impossible.

Thus, because of the institutional constraints on marked social change in the liberal direction (wall street, MSM, congress), i am satisfied with what i get from Obama, provided that we give him gentle reminders now and again that progressive values matter. But, in trith, I think he knows them and i think he believes them, even if he cant do everything I want about making progressive ideals a reality.

eric

Steve,
Quit knocking down straw men. These newspaper articles you are refuting don't really exist.

If anything, Obama might be accused of nutpicking -- highlighting the most extreme opposition which is more easily knocked down. Except the nuts are, more often than not, elected officials with actual influence on policy.

Rove false accusation that Obama uses straw man arguments is actually a straw man argument in itself!

But on second thought it's not, it's just simple lying.

It happens because in today's world of big-time "journalism," there are no such things as "facts." All "journalism" is nothing more than the constant attempt to show that opposite viewpoints are nothing more than different but equally valid interpretations of reality. Democrats say 2+2 = 4, but the Times will give just as much weight and ink to Republican claims that the sum is 5. That's why it's extremely easy for Cooper to make an assertion and then refute it in the same article without recognizing her cognitive dissonance; both viewpoints are equally valid, even if they're maintained by the same person.

George Orwell termed it very accurately: Doublethink. That's why I'm not shedding any tears at all over the demise of newspapers such as the Times. They're rotting from within, and have been for some time.

I have no idea why articles like these get published.

They get published because "the press is free to he who owns one," and the owners of the media are all conservatives who see Obama and the Democrats in power as an affront to their imperial highness.

Ms Cooper probably doesn't even know what a "straw man" is (as a rhetorical figure). All she knows is its common introduction "some say". So, every time she hears "some say", she thinks it's a "straw man".

It's a common enough problem, easily solved by a short course of classical logic. Just because every A=B, doesn't mean that every B=A (every dog is a mammal but not every mammal is a dog). But a lot of people (another version of "some say", BTW) don't realise that.

Steve, this article, and others like it, are the journalistic equivalent of "make-up" calls in sports. There's a close and contested call, one team's coach or manager or player(s) bitch about it, and soon thereafter, another close contested call goes the other way.

In this case, the NYT is still doing penance for not doing more to help McCain last year. And for not being nicer to Bush. And for publishing news stories that had the vice of being true and damaging to conservative politicians in general at any point during the last several decades.

I think they've worked off their debt from the Pentagon Papers, though. But only recently.

(either that, or the NYT does actually troll conservative flacks for ideas for pieces. Hell, that's probably *also* true...)

The strawmen that Republicans create to defeat something or someone they don't like are a way for them to control the debate. Unfortunately Democrats traditionally haven't been good at tearing these things down and the Media either because of laziness or fear of having their neutrality questioned, don't seem to either see though this set-up or don't want to expose this set-up. Obama seems to change the dialog a bit - hopefully having someone a bit more savvy at the top will help.

Karl Rove is made of straw.

Bush and Cheney as straw men, hmm? Would have preferred seeing them as "WickerMen".

One of the more common Republican projections is Obama's alleged use of "straw men" arguments.

Fixed.

Bush used straw men, and much more egregiously (something like, "Some say we shouldn't defend our nation against terrorists. I disagree."), all the time.

Others have responded to Steve's surprise, where dismay at the continuing media message would be more appropriate. So just to add two points. First, Publius doesn't even bother with evidence on one of Cooper's points, about climate change. And of course the right very much has opposed regulation on climate change as burdensome on the economy at this time (a handy shift from burdensome, period). And second, even if Cooper were right on facts, lumping it all as the straw-man fallacy shamelessly overlooks the difference in the right's appeal to emotions, in such claims as that Democrats want to talk with or appease terrorists. Questioning one's opponent's patriotism and calling one's opponent complicit with the "enemy" is the same old McCarthyism, and it is on quite another plane.

With this in mind, it was only natural that the media follow suit.

The "liberal" media? You don't say!

You've said a mouthful there, Steve. Joe Conason documented in his book Big Lies, back in 2003, the righ uses its Tinker-to-Evers-to-chance -- in their case, Rush to Drudge to Fox -- to inject its propaganda into the so-called "liberal media."

Fortunately, the American people's bullshit detectors have been recalibrated by the massive failure of Republican policies to deliver on their promise. But that doesn't mean the lazy media won't stop having narratives handed to them by the Republican propaganda minions.

The question shouldn't be why these articles get published but how do they get away with publishing articles like this with no repercussions. The answer is simple. I would estimate that 99.9% of the American population do not know what a straw-man argument is (or what a fallacy is, or what cogent means). Hell, they don't even use the word ironic correctly.

The dumbing down of America in action.

Steve, I don't mean to be uncharitable but by now, you need to know why such crap is published. If you already do, then say so instead of the endless and tiring game of the perplexed naïf who scratches his head about right-wing and SCLM idiocy. It's getting old and it hurts our message.

And yes, most people are logically illiterate. Logical and scientific illiteracy especially characterizes right-wing rabble. Look at the pitiful "reasoning" expressed in comments at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/5389278/Obamas-green-guru-calls-for-white-roofs.html....

The URL is pretty self-explanatory. The idiots can't get for example that if there are two effects and one is negative to the other (like white in summer versus white in winter), there can still be a remaining net effects. Or, that white roofs wouldn't help reduce warming since the "reflect the heat back into" the air or space (!) anyway, with complete disregard for spectrum differences. Of course they wrap everything into political conspiracies, despite the old Svante Arrhenius paper getting the modern AGW theory going in 1896. Oh, and our villagers are hardly any better as we can see.

Cooper really doesn't know what a "straw man" argument is in forensic terms. It's kind of like how everybody nowadays uses "begging the question" to mean "raises the problem of..." rather than making a proposition whose conclusion is already assumed in the premise itself.

I have no idea why articles like these get published.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. -- Inigo Montoya

Obviously most newspaper editors think that a strawman argument is an argument that begins with "Some people have said..."

Article like these get published because the media are precisely as ethically and intellectually bankrupt as the corporations which own them.

To be fair, Obama definitely set up some strawmen in his speech about national security last week:

We see that, above all, in how the recent debate has been obscured by two opposite and absolutist ends. On one side of the spectrum, there are those who make little allowance for the unique challenges posed by terrorism, and who would almost never put national security over transparency. On the other end of the spectrum, there are those who embrace a view that can be summarized in two words: “anything goes.� Their arguments suggest that the ends of fighting terrorism can be used to justify any means, and that the President should have blanket authority to do whatever he wants – provided that it is a President with whom they agree.

Both sides may be sincere in their views, but neither side is right.

He managed to set up strawmen on either side of him to make himself look like the sensible centrist. But it's baloney.

I go along with the folks who maintain that this Helene Cooper person doesn't know what a strawman argument is. Nor do her editors.

Amazing, at the NY Times, but there it is.

My wife worked with a newsperson with a graduate degree from Columbia, a very highly regarded J school. This person couldn't understand the metaphor, "The bill went through the legislative process like Sherman through Georgia."

After having it explained at the level of "You know that scene in "Gone with the Wind" where Atlanta burned? That was General Sherman marching through Georgia!"

The reply was "I'm from New York, and we didn't have anything to do with the Civil War."

Unbelievable. We are doomed to repeat history forever, as people won't remember history just from their grandparents' times.

TG Chicago, I empathize (!) with your concerns, but: setting up conceptual bookends of the extreme positions doesn't mean to imply there are very many people who believe in either total extreme (and given almost anything, *someone* out there believes...) The point is to set up the conceptual dialectic, not to describe the significant partisan actors. And it's OK and intellectually honest to do that.

However, Ms. Helene Cooper was not intellectually honest.

tyrannogenius

These are allegedly educated people, but they don't understand the English language. They are using the words "straw man" when they mean "scapegoat" and they confuse "empathy" with "sympathy." Can we ask their universities to recall their degrees?

For what it's worth, one of my all-time favorites of Dubya's strawman comments was during an address back in '04 when he said something along the lines of "some people believe that brown-skinned people aren't capable of governing themselves."
Good stuff.

Interesting post. Online dating has sure influenced our lives in interesting ways.