Home / General / Saletanisms: The Vacuities and Hacktacularities of Lord Saletan

Saletanisms: The Vacuities and Hacktacularities of Lord Saletan

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Admittedly, identifying the worst manifestation of a silly concept badly executed is a wearying, impossible exercise, so identifying the very worst “Kerryism” is as inherently futile as discerning the worst episode of “Who’s the Boss?” or the worst film directed by Roland Emmerich. Nonetheless, I’m inclined to make such a claim about this one anyway.

Here’s the original Kerry sentence:

If I’m president, we’ll have a military second to nobody in this world, and I won’t hesitate to use force if necessary as a last resort to achieve our goal.

And here’s the version Saletan prefers:

If I’m president, we’ll have a military second to nobody in this world, and I won’t hesitate to use force to achieve our goal

This is just utterly asinine.

1)You’ll note, looking at Kerry’s original, that there’s nothing remotely prolix or evasive about it. The underlying point of “Kerryisms”–which seems to be the breathtaking insight that stump speeches and extemporaneous answers to interviewers won’t be uniformly constructed in ways Strunk & White would approve of–is pretty lame to begin with, but if it identified examples of Kerry using large numbers of words with no content it might occasionally amuse the very bored Mickey Kaus fan. The sentence here, on the other hand, is a completely straightforward statement, clearly expressing a substantive claim in simple and concise language. This has been true of most recent Kerryisms.

2)Saletan’s revision isn’t a simpler way of expressing the same thing; it’s a completely different argument. The “as a last resort” qualifier is the heart of Kerry’s argument. Without it, there’s no distinction between his policy and Bush’s. Hell, why not cut the sentence down to, “When I’m president, we’ll have a military.”? See, nice and simple!

3)What makes “Kerryisms” not just worthless but actively pernicious is the sensibility it expresses. Not just the fake “balance”, but the obsession with meaningless superficialities over content. The point of Kerryisms seems to be that using any qualifications is inherently bad, and anything worth saying should be able to be expressed as the simplest banality, and that how politicians speak is more important that what they stand for. It fits in perfectly with the Saletan/Kaus obsession with the empty tautology of what they call “character” over the substantive differences of politics.

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