In the chapter entitled “The Arts of Selling” from 1958’s Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley wrote that “[t]he survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information. A dictatorship, on the other hand, maintains itself by censoring or distorting the facts, and by appealing, not to reason, not to enlightened self-interest, but to passion and prejudice [.]” Which is why under the soft dictatorship of Barack Hussein Obama, the American people may be hard pressed to make realistic choices since they are far too susceptible to the distortions of language.
Logical fallacies are really “weaponized irrationality” gussied up to catch people unaware. Ad hominem attacks against an individual instead of the merit of an idea have been a hallmark of this administration. In 2014 when attempting to persuade the country on his immigration policy, Obama utilized the ergo decedo fallacy by attacking Republicans for their party position rather than for their argument.
Logical fallacies have long been the lifeblood of dishonest politicians and in Obama, we find an abundance of them. A favorite fallacy is the strawman, which is an attack on a position that is not even held by the other side. Obama’s strawmen have been those never-named naysayers Obama claims are “urging him to sit on his hands at the White House and do nothing to address any of the economic or national security problems facing the country.” Some telltale indicators that the straw man tactic is being used are the words “there are those who say” or “some say” as in Obama’s “[s]ome people say that maybe I’m being too idealistic.” Then there is the false choice embedded inside another straw man as in his “You can’t have 100 percent security and then also have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience”– yet no one ever asked for 100 percent of these things in the first place.