Clooney just embarrasses himself by such ignorant and offensive conduct. But an accomplished man like Steve Wynn has no reason to pay any regard to anything Clooney might say, anyway. Water off a duck’s back...
The Adolescent President
The rhetorical excesses of Barack Obama.
By George Will
NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE
APRIL 23, 2014
Recently, Barack Obama — a Demosthenes determined to elevate our politics from coarseness to elegance, a Pericles sent to ameliorate our rhetorical impoverishment — spoke at the University of Michigan. He came to that very friendly venue — in 2012, he received 67 percent of the vote in Ann Arbor’s county — after visiting a local sandwich shop, where a muse must have whispered in the presidential ear. Representative Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) had recently released his budget, so Obama expressed his disapproval by calling it, for the benefit of his academic audience, a “meanwich” and a “stinkburger.”
Try to imagine Franklin Roosevelt or Dwight Eisenhower or John Kennedy or Ronald Reagan talking like that. It is unimaginable that those grown-ups would resort to japes that fourth-graders would not consider sufficiently clever for use on a playground.
Anyone who has tried to engage a member of that age cohort in an argument probably recognizes the four basic teenage tropes, which also are the only arrows in Obama’s overrated rhetorical quiver. They were all employed by him last week when he went to the White House briefing room to exclaim, as he is wont to do, about the excellence of the Affordable Care Act.
First came the invocation of a straw man. Celebrating the ACA’s enrollment numbers, Obama, referring to Republicans, charged: “They said nobody would sign up.” Of course, no one said this. Obama often is what political philosopher Kenneth Minogue said of an adversary – “a pyromaniac in a field of straw men.”
Adolescents also try to truncate arguments by saying that nothing remains of any arguments against their arguments.
Regarding the ACA, Obama said the debate is “settled” and “over.” Progressives also say the debate about catastrophic consequences of man-made climate change is “over,” so everyone should pipe down. And they say the debates about the efficacy of universal preschool, and the cost-benefit balance of a minimum-wage increase, are over. Declaring an argument over is so much more restful than engaging with evidence.
A third rhetorical move by argumentative adolescents is to declare that there is nothing to argue about because everything is going along swimmingly. Seven times Obama asserted that the ACA is “working.” That is, however, uninformative because it is ambiguous...
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http://www.nationalreview.com/node/376446/print