Thursday, August 30, 2007

 

Rosa Brooks and the Pathetic Fallacy

Rosa 'Luxemburg' Brooks, lefty law professor somewhere and weekly columnist for the rapidly sinking L.A. Times, is usually unreadable and silly, but today she was spectacularly so. This is the same woman Hugh Hewitt had on his show to talk about FISA and she had a deer caught in headlights reaction to the basic questions. I'll try to keep this brief.

Here is her unbounded fountain of compassion for the suffering of the South Vietnamese and Cambodians slaughtered by the Communist totalitarians starting in 1975 (as part of the incredible 100,000,000 plus political murders by the left during the 20th Century): Yes, many innocent civilians suffered in the aftermath of the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam (Wow, I'm moved by her truly magnanimous spirit).

She qualifies it, however, as follows: -- but it's more accurate to attribute their suffering to the prolongation of the war itself, rather than to the U.S. withdrawal as such.

What?

Our part in the war was over in 1973, in April, when our last ground forces left Viet Nam. I'm unsure how we prolonged the war after we withdrew from the battlefield. The NVA invaded and conquered the South in 1975. How is that our fault? How did we prolong the war by making the NVA break the peace accords and attack the South? Of course, lefty logic often baffles me, but I'm sure this makes sense to someone else.

There's another profoundly lefty and profoundly wrong bit of pseudo history in there: To Bush, the tragedy of the Vietnam War is that we didn't let it drag on for another decade or so.

She's being ironic; but you see, to the left, the end of the war was inevitable, the attempt to save South Viet Nam from Communist aggression doomed to failure, and it was our mistake even to try to stop the spread of Communism from the North to South when it was foreordained and the effort just wasted lives delaying the inevitable. She literally couldn't be more wrong. But back to the stellar piece.

Then she proceeds to make, on her own, a series of logical non sequiturs which she attributes to the President. No, their yours, professor. This is a sort of stylistic pathetic fallacy; that is, to repeat in the style of writing the subject matter of the writing. In the real world, for example, to employ this style, if you were complaining about off key singing, you would sing the complaints off key. Here she is accusing the President of making unconnected historical connections by making unconnected historical connections. She's so droll.

Of course, high on the list of things not to do in writing is employ this sort of stylistic pathetic fallacy, but perhaps she missed that lesson, just as she missed the key FISA court precedents about a year and a half ago.

Labels:


Comments: Post a Comment

<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?