Logically, what’s wrong with the following passage from Michelle Malkin’s recent post:
As for President-elect Obama, his true views about ICE are well-known. Despite telling Katie Couric that his aunt should be required to follow the law because “We’re a nation of laws…I’m a strong believer you have to obey the law,” Obama scolded ICE agents who do their jobs for “terrorizing” communities.
If you answered that the conjunction “despite” should indicate not just contrast but some sort of connection or contingency that was contradicted (e.g. “Despite her liberal views, she voted for the conservative candidate”), you saw through Malkin’s rhetorically abusive strategy. There is of course no connection (and not even a contradiction) between Obama’s belief that his aunt should obey the law in a nation of laws, and his rebuke of ICE agents for terrorizing communities. Criticizing police brutality is not the same as criticizing all police or the laws they enforce.
The Hot Air article that Malkin links to makes the same sort of erroneous generalization (if Obama criticizes certain enforcers, he criticizes all enforcement), and uses equivocation as well to besmirch the candidate.
Hot Air’s quote from Obama’s speech at the National Council of La Raza (emphasis theirs):
When communities are terrorized by ICE immigration raids, when nursing mothers are torn from their babies, when children come home from school to find their parents missing, when people are detained without access to legal counsel, when all that is happening, the system just isn’t working, and we need to change it.
Hot Air’s comment on the quote:
So now the US government is a terrorist organization? Not only does this demonstrate his demagoguery on immigration, it also shows his cluelessness in the war on terrorists. If he can’t tell the difference between al-Qaeda and ICE, then not only should he not be President, but Illinois needs to answer for his selection as a Senator.
True enough, Obama used the verb “terrorize.” But does that mean he considers the ICE agents “terrorists”? If I say “As a child, Ted was terrorized by playground bullies,” am I somehow linking Ted’s persecutors with Osama Bin Laden? When Obama says “the system just isn’t working, and we need to change it,” is he saying we need to eliminate the system, or simply that we need to reform the enforcement so that nursing mothers aren’t snatched from babies, detainees are provided with counsel, etc.
Incidentally Hot Air even misuses language in its concession of a point. Hot Air’s concession:
Update: The nursing story turns out to be true, at least partially:
Federal immigration agents were searching a house in Ohio last month when they found a young Honduran woman nursing her baby.
The woman, Saída Umanzor, is an illegal immigrant and was taken to jail to await deportation. Her 9-month-old daughter, Brittney Bejarano, who was born in the United States and is a citizen, was put in the care of social workers.
The story never claims that the baby was “torn” from her mother’s breast though; apparently ICE waited until Umanzor finished the feeding to arrest her. And pardon my indifference, but nursing mothers who break the law don’t have immunity from arrest and detention.
This concession seeks to attack Obama further, for lying about the facts. In reality, Obama does not claim that the baby was “torn” from her mother’s breast either. He simply says “when nursing mothers are torn from their babies.” A woman does not have to be feeding her baby at a given moment in order to be a “nursing mother”; she’s a nursing mother until she weans her baby. Had he wanted to indicate “torn from her mother’s breast,” he would have said “when mothers are torn from nursing their babies.”
Watch out for what looks like lazy language. In the hands of propagandists, it’s really an attempt to indoctrinate lazy readers.