My entire adult life I have been held back by the heavy burden of a public-school education. You see, I am intellectually incapable of understanding the sophisticated and unassailable arguments put forward by my societal betters.
The debate over funding food stamps (SNAP) during the government shutdown has driven home this hard lesson on my inadequacies. For a master class on rhetoric, see the following,
Al Franken (Harvard): “Trump’s withholding of SNAP is truly evil. This level of cruelty is beyond comprehension.”
Amy Klobuchar (Yale, U. Chicago): “Trump will do everything but feed families in need.”
Tina Smith (Stanford, Dartmouth): “Clarifying question: Does needlessly keeping food from working families make us great?”
Chuck Schumer (Harvard): “DONALD TRUMP is depriving hungry Americans of SNAP”
Bernie Sanders (U. Chicago): “If you’re a poor kid on SNAP, Trump appeals a court decision that would have prevented you from going hungry.”
I could go on. The federal government is currently in a state of “shutdown” since October 1 because Senate Democrats have prevented the passing of an appropriations bill.
You can’t spend money without an appropriation. That is why the Trump Administration was not funding SNAP this month. They had no legal basis to do so.
But Democrats and media outlets have spun the issue as Trump voluntarily and unilaterally “withholding” food stamp money out of malice and with the specific intention to murder 42 million people.
Unfortunately, I was exposed in my first year at public university to an introductory class on classic rhetoric. I was introduced to the concepts of ethos, pathos and logos.
I was mistaught that logos was the highest form of argument. Under logos (logic) appeals to authority (ethos) and/or emotion (pathos) were considered to be logical fallacies (something to be avoided).
It turns out that in the elite world, of which I am not a member, the only acceptable form of argument is pathos. The use of either ethos or logos is immoral. If you can frame any issue as harming children, you will win the argument, automatically. And all arguments of public policy can be framed as harming children. Any alternative framing is something done solely by Nazis.
Narrow exceptions to this rule exist for abortion, human trafficking, gender-affirming medical care, and one or two others not worth mentioning. But I digress.
The important thing is that Republicans will always be on the losing end of every public policy debate. And after losing every debate, Republicans will lose every election.
There are no tradeoffs in public policy. There are infinite and ever-renewable resources available if only the rich were a tiny bit less greedy.
“Won’t somebody please think of the children.”
