White House Photo
Or, The reasonalizification of a plainly-written statement from the White House, the pixels that launched a thousand snarks. Here are the two paragraphs that seemingly contain the gist of it:
The White House
Statement by the President on Airstrikes in Syria… We were joined in this action by our friends and partners — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Bahrain, and Qatar. America is proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with these nations on behalf of our common security.
[…]
Last night, we also took strikes to disrupt plotting against the United States and our allies by seasoned al Qaeda operatives in Syria who are known as the Khorasan Group. And once again, it must be clear to anyone who would plot against America and try to do Americans harm that we will not tolerate safe havens for terrorists who threaten our people….
That’s where the serious policy wonks will go.
The political paparazzi will head in the other direction.
How will this impact the UN General Assembly?
How will the terrorism issue be used for political gain by the GOPs?
How long will Obama be salt-and-pepper? Do you think he should dye or bleach it?
I KNOW he’s doing the thing we wanted, but he should have done it months ago!
I’m conflicted: On the one hand I LOVE all the slaughter and mayhem, but on the other, I hate the president. How should I FEEL?
How will this affect the election?
How will this effect the erection?
“Reasonalizing” is a portmanteu word formed of the odd conjunction of ‘analyze’ and ‘reason.’
Since these are virtual synonyms, in the Real World™, multiplying them results in a sum that is neither reasonable NOR analytical. It is logick: a form of magical thinking that pretends to be logical. More than a pseudoscience, like, say, phrenology, reasonalizing creates the magical conclusion that it makes any sense at all.
Exempli gratia: John Bolton.
I must confess that I was listening to BBC news on our local NPR station, and who should they bring in as an “expert” but John “Got Milf?” Bolton?!?
Bolton the Boltroon™. Super-power? The gift of getting on
media and having anyone listen to his nasal-whiney nonsense.
He was “DeLIGHTed” that Obama was launching airstrikes, but … and thence a long character assassination of the President, a la Faux Nooz. It’s not that I fault him for doing it — given the track record of the Administration and war that got us into this mess — but that the BBC let his partisan, lunatic raving go on for so damned long.
When did the GOPs cease to be a serious party? When did they become neo-Imperialists and Dominionists and Rapture Christian Soldiers?
The man we hate killed a bunch of people we hate and “I’m deLIGHTed” but we must continue to hate the man by demanding that he kill those people we hate sooner, and he told us all so, and why weren’t more bodies piling up already?
Woof.
It sounded like Charles Manson mistakenly gave his parole testimony in front of a Kiwanis Club luncheon.
What the hell happened to us that one party just went off the rails, started stealing elections, started looting the treasury, started wars, started killing people in wholesale lots, started screeching that we weren’t killing ENOUGH people?
And so it goes.
Naturally, the yabble proceeding from the president’s statement basically stomps the statement itself to the bottom of the yabble pile.
The President is taking a pragmatic course, one that the American people seemingly agree with.
We live in parlous times, however, and the world continues to fall into ever-widening war.
I support my president and my country, and will not use this grave moment to take political cheap shots at the opposition.
They wouldn’t be able to understand all the complicated and abstruse polysyllabic words anyway.
Courage.
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Mr. Williams has a lively blog His Vorpal Sword. This is cross-posted from his blog.
A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog, His Vorpal Sword (no spaces) dot com.