I went looking for an exemplary OpEd to diagram some instances of rhetorical fallacies and other unethical rhetorical strategies and found this gem from the right honourable gentleman, Jason Chaffetz:
Jason Chaffetz: Democrats are working to weaponize government power against their adversaries – It must stop
Firstly, the title, “Democrats are working to weaponize government power against their adversaries - It must stop”, deflect much?
Next, this thing is chock full of controversial assertions of fact and nary a citation to be found. Actually, this is not quite true. Foxnews.com employs this odd convention of highlighting proper names and linking them to some kind of background definition page with general content related to that person or organization. This can have the deceiving effect of leaving the impression that a controversial statement has a cited source article behind it if the reader does not click the link. Pretty sneaky.
Moving on to the opening sentence,
“The alarming revelation that Rep. Adam Schiff’s House Intelligence Committee obtained and released telephone records of a journalist, another House member and President Trump’s lawyers is just the latest in an escalating pattern of abuse by Democrats.”
Wow, jump straight to the top dog fallacy, lying. What Jason, no foreplay? What the intel committee actually collected was the phone records of other undisclosed targets of the investigation who happened to have had phone interactions with “a journalist, a house member, and President Trump’s lawyers”(Schiff: No, We Didn’t Subpoena John Solomon’s Phone Records). Now, it is likely that they did obtain the phone records of a certain personal lawyer to the President, but that certain lawyer seems to wear many more hats than just his lawyerin’ hat and I suspect that it was not his lawyerin’ activities that made him a target of the investigation.
Now onto sentence number 2,
“Democratic attempts to weaponize government power against their adversaries have largely gone unpunished, leading to ever more brazen offenses.”
This is a pretty serious and controversial charge. It is irresponsible to make such a charge without first presenting credible evidence. We do not find that here, but we do find one of those sneaky definition links hinting at citation. Jason should know better but I guess his evidence supporting this opinion is coming. I can’t wait!
Next up we find,
“Having once held the power to write congressional subpoenas myself, I am familiar with the restrictions on Congress. For instance, the courts have not allowed Congress to compel documents from private entities unless the information informs legislation.”
Ok, I’ll be charitable here and label this one as a Fallacy of Ignorance, but more likely, Jason knew exactly what he was doing and this is just another lie. He claims that he is familiar with the restrictions on congressional subpoenas but if that were true he would know that Congress is restricted to inquiries that fall within its jurisdiction(Congressional Investigations). I would have thought that Jason would have been aware that oversight of the executive branch is part of Congress’ jurisdiction. Well, for fun, let’s instead assume Jason is just ignorant. In this scenario, Jason makes the logical boner that just because the courts have not been required to rule on a case involving subpoenaed information from a private entity in an executive oversight investigation, such a subpoena request is therefore restricted.
Moving on to,
“There is no legislation under consideration that requires Congress to view call records of the president’s lawyers or the media.”.
Yeah, so? Why … would …. there ….. be? Not really sure what unholy shit he is trying to pull here. Maybe a distraction? Maybe a non sequitur? Clouding the issue? It is a kind of ridiculous statement of an obvious fact that is vaguely related to his argument but does not really add to it. Is there a name for such a fallacy? If not, can we call it the Chaffetz Fallacy? Actually, I guess it’s kind of a Red Herring.
Next, we have,
“ Intelligence Committee Chairman Schiff, D-Calif., has weaponized the subpoena power of Congress to collect data to which he is not entitled.”
This is another controversial statement preceding the ‘proof’. This time we get something that is slightly more clever(this is not saying much),
“There was no justification for Schiff to use his subpoena power to obtain and publish the records of telephone calls by the ranking member of his committee, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif. Nor was there adequate reason to spy on a journalist or legal counsel for the president.”
These two are technically true statements of fact, but they introduce a false implication to his argument. Schiff did neither of these things that Jason states were unjustified so it doesn’t much matter if they’re justified now does it, Jason? Nice try.
This is getting a little tedious, I’m gonna start taking bigger bites.
“Schiff’s abuse of power follows a much more audacious violation by a politicized FBI, as revealed by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz. His recent report detailed numerous egregious abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) by Obama administration bureaucrats.
In one example from the FISA report, we learned that the FBI in 2016 sent an informant to ask whether the Trump election campaign was planning an October surprise. That is information that wouldn’t be particularly relevant to a criminal investigation, but would certainly be relevant to political espionage.
Though this flagrant perversion of the FBI and the FISA process may yet be prosecuted, thus far Democrats have gotten exactly what they wanted from their Deep State allies – a thin pretext upon which to derail the Trump presidency with years of negative stories in the media.”
Ok, there is a lot to unpack here. First I will point out an instance of self-contradiction which I do not believe is a suggested strategy of persuasive rhetoric. He is suggesting here that Schiff’s purported abuse follows “a much more audacious violation by a politicized FBI”, but remember his assertion from sentence 2 of “ever more brazen offenses”. Which is it, Jason? It seems that simple reason is not your strong suit. As for dubious rhetorical constructs in the section, we find a nasty brew of exaggeration, cherry-picking, and invoking of ‘devil terms’. I will leave sorting these out as an exercise to the reader. Oh yeah, I am surprised too that it took him this long to invoke the ‘Deep State’ boogyman. Don’t worry, Hillary is coming next.
What follows is a summarized rehash of many of Fox News’ favorite scandals from the Obama years including the hits, Hillary’s emails, IRS harassment of conservative non-profits, and the secret service retribution against Chaffetz himself. The summary only presentation here would be okay if it included citations to back it up but alas, no citations. Smack in the middle of this mess we find this beauty,
“But the spying even candidate Trump and the Clinton email investigation.”
WTF!? I guess the editors don’t want to read this crap either. To be fair some of the events summarized in this section do point to actual misdeeds by some Democrats that we should not excuse. Also, we should not excuse Jason’s employment of a Hasty Generalization Fallacy where he extrapolates that since there are some bad Democrats abusing the system, they all must be doing it. Deep State! Bwa-Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha!
And now finally onto the summary. Here we find a vague call to “take action now and prosecute”. I am not sure if this vagueness is an intentional persuasive strategy or just laziness. I cannot believe that he actually thinks there is something to prosecute related to the intel committee and the released phone records. I guess he feels his readers won’t realize that though.