CSotD: Grading Biden on the Bellman’s Curve

David Ostow manages to both echo my despair at the present moment and give me flashbacks to the days when I worked in local TV and saw this display way more often than I wanted to. That is, on the station where I worked. It was great fun to see one of our competitors put it on the air.

That same attitude makes Ostow’s cartoon something of a Patriotism Test, because someone who genuinely values the country should see it as “ours” and upsetting, while someone who loves only power sees it as that other party in a state of chaos.

Adding to that is the depressingly large number of professed Democrats who are calling the control room and urging the board op to just interrupt the broadcast and put on the color bars anyway.

I don’t often agree with Lisa Benson (Counterpoint), but she’s got the panic mode down right.

I’d like the cartoon better if the ship were on an only somewhat storm-tossed sea, such that the crew was panicking instead of working to get things stabilized, but that’s a quibble reasonable people can have. The panic is certainly there, and panic indicates a lack of reasonable response.

As for the Bellman, I’ve quoted him before and certainly often enough that I, too, have told you something thrice, though that’s not the reason you should believe it.

If you read the poem, you’ll find that nobody should ever believe the Bellman, which is why the poem is a classic of humor and not to be mistaken for the Aeneid, much of which Romans took both literally and seriously.

The Bellman’s insistence is funny because we all know how often, and how readily, repetition is mistaken for truth.

Juxtaposition of the Day

Gary Varvel — Creators

Dana Summers — Tribune

However an economist would assess the current administration’s economic policy, there is no such thing as “Bidenflation” and, in fact, competent observers are generally pleased with how inflation has come down, though there continues to be debate over what the Fed should do and when.

But we’re roughly in the middle of the G20 for inflation, and most of the countries that are worse off are worse off in other ways as well.

As for retirement accounts, they’re doing pretty well in 2024, since most tend to follow the stock market, which has been steadily rising. There are aspects of the economy that you may or may not blame on the president, but Varvel is wrong about inflation.

Still, if everybody continually harps on it, the numbers don’t matter.

When you ask people what the Number One problem is, they’ll say “Inflation” because the Bellmen have told them so, a great many more times than thrice.

Ditto with crime at the border, though this is less a matter of failure to crunch numbers and more a case of bigotry.

First of all, the oft-repeated fiction of Mexico emptying its prisons and mental hospitals over the border is an outright, ridiculous lie. You don’t have to be terribly bright to see through that one.

Meanwhile, you only have to peek at the statistics to realize that migrants actually commit less crime than Americans born here. Though logic alone might hint that, if you’re in danger of getting snagged by ICE, you aren’t going to do something that will get you picked up by Barney Fife.

Are they simply wrong or are they deliberately lying? Or have they simply heard it thrice?

It doesn’t matter, because if they keep saying it, they become the Bellmen that other people listen to, and believe. And then vote accordingly.

Which brings us here:

Juxtaposition of the Day #2

Clay Jones

Peter Steiner

Jones provides an illustration of a rhetorical device known as the “Gish Gallop,” named for a creationist who used it to shut down debate on Biblical accuracy. And while Jones provides the take-away by Trump supporters, Steiner provides the too-frequent response from Democrats.

Heather Cox Richardson brought the Gish Gallop to the forefront in her June 27 Substack about the debate, and a slightly out-of-context summation has been making the rounds. Here’s what she actually wrote:

I’ve seen the Gish Gallop called a “logical fallacy” but it isn’t. As Cox Richardson says, it’s a rhetorical technique.

The difference is that a logical fallacy is a mistake that doesn’t stand up to examination. Once explained, it should deflate that approach, though it doesn’t mean the person who advanced it is entirely wrong. They just mounted an inoperable argument.

A rhetorical device, by contrast, is intentional. It can become habitual in some people, particularly if they’ve found it to be successful, but, even if incorporated into their overall approach to life, it remains at some level intentional.

In any case, it doesn’t matter if Trump truly believes he graduated with honors or had a shot at a career in Major League Baseball or never met E. Jean Carroll and never partied with Jeffrey Epstein and never called the military dead suckers and losers.

What matters is how often he’s made these claims and whether his supporters believe that what he tells them three times — or a dozen times — is true.

And speaking of Bellmen

Looking at this morning’s NYTimes splash page might make you wonder if they want you to know that what they tell you six times is true?

The Washington Post, which has not gone easy on Biden, isn’t avoiding the topic, but they have a few other news items on their minds today.

While at the Times, one of their Bellmen wrote this:

While another team of NYTimes reporters wrote this:

Though it seems everyone else quoted him thusly:

And when I say “everyone else quoted him,” here’s a sample of what you get if you ask Google News about the phrase “almost fell asleep”:

You would actually get more results than that, but the point stands.

One misquote is an error. Two misquotes in the same newspaper falls one shy of a Bellman’s truth.

You might say they nearly made it almost true.

Fortunately, Mike Luckovich reminds us, there is a cure.

But depends on what you put in there.

While we wait for the outcome, Phil Ochs and Edgar Allen Poe are the only bellmen I want to hear from: