Links to rhetorical tools:

Here are links to the rhetorical tools used in this class:

Schemes & Tropes -- Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca -- Fallacies -- Burke -- Rhetorical Toolbox -- Conspiracy Rhetorics

Friday, February 9, 2018

White House, Kelly, and Porter

Several fallacies are used in this highly-charged political blog. One of the less obvious ones is the "No-True-Scotsman." This fallacy isn't really even used in the blog itself, but the blog author, Laura Clawson, hints that the fallacy was used in the period that she is writing about. Clawson quotes Kelly's discussion of the type of person that Porter is and states: "Yet even though he knew that Porter would be denied security clearance, Kelly not only didn’t fire Porter ahead of the reports of his history of abuse, he stood by him as the first reports came out, describing Porter in glowing terms. Even Kelly’s walkback of his initial support for Porter specified that 'I stand by my previous comments of the Rob Porter that I have come to know.'" This shows that Kelly himself was using the fallacy of "No-True Scotsman" when defending Porter - almost like "No true man/politician would beat his wife (I mean, come on, we all hate politicians so this one isn't that hard to believe).

The second fallacy used in the blog post is "Quoting out of Context." This fallacy is used directly by the author when she states: "Many of the scandals coming out of this White House have come straight from Donald Trump. We spend a lot of time talking about how difficult it is for his staff to have a consistent message when he might undermine it in a tweet 10 minutes later, and how Trump promotes infighting among staff. But in this case, Trump genuinely seems to have been out of the loop, reminding us once again that the staff he’s handpicked are both terrible people and very well capable of screwing things up all on their own." Honestly, the reader could have finished reading the blog post without this paragraph and been just fine, but I feel like the author is trying to throw in one last stab at the president, whom I don't care for, when the situation wasn't even about the president.

Link: https://www.dailykos.com/

It is currently on the front page as: "Epic botching of White House wife beater case forces Kelly to clarify that domestic violence is bad"

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