1 Boring Old Man

Talking Points was a new term for me with the coming of the Bush Administration, though I guess it had been around before for a long time. Often, they are short, pithy phrases [like those to the right] that imply, but do not directly state, some negative quality. In a formal sense, they represent something known to logicians as "Proof by Assertion":

Proof by assertion is a logical fallacy. A proposition is repeatedly restated regardless of contradiction. Sometimes this may be repeated until challenges dry up, at which point it is asserted as fact due to it not being contradicted (argumentum ad nauseam). In other cases its repetition may be cited as evidence of its truth, in a variant of the appeal to authority or appeal to belief fallacies.

This logical fallacy is commonly used as a form of rhetoric by politicians, and it is one of the mechanisms of reinforcing urban legends. In its extreme form, it can also be a form of brainwashing. Modern politics is fraught with examples of proof by assertion, and wide acceptance of many policies and perspectives is driven in part by the endless repetition of slogans. This practice can be widely observed in the distribution of "talking points," which are collections of short phrases that are issued to members of modern political parties for recitation to achieve maximum message repetition.

The technique is described in a saying, often attributed to Lenin, as "A lie told often enough becomes the truth"…

Apparently, one has to keep them coming and changing at a fast pace, otherwise, they become obnoxious [browbeating] and lose their zing. I once found myself in a discussion with a guy who was addicted to them. When I talked, he waited until one was pertinent, then he said it as an aside and "smirked." It wasn’t a discussion after all.

Karl Rove is the source of many of these Talking Points. In a speech this week, he said:

"It is useful to remind people what [Democrats] said and what they do. I think they have given us here, especially in the last couple of weeks, a potent set of votes to talk about. You had 90 percent of House Democrats voting against the terrorist-surveillance program, nearly three-quarters of Senate Democrats and 80 percent of House Democrats voting against the terrorist-interrogation act. Something is fundamentally flawed."

"Democrats in the House voted against interrogating terrorists."

President Bush … telling George Stephanopoulos: "There’s certainly a stepped-up level of violence, and we’re heading into an election… My gut tells me that they have all along been trying to inflict enough damage that we’d leave."