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an editorial today entitled Wartime Rhetoric, the New
York Times took exception with President George W. Bush's use
of the phrase "Wanted: Dead or Alive" in describing the
fate of Osama bin Laden. It suggested that he should take rhetorical
lessons from Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, both of whom
"understood the power of words and put them to effective use
..." The opinion writers behind this editorial should study
their subject before lecturing the president and their readers.
And how little research would have been required.
For instance,
Architects
of Victory by Joseph Shattan (published by the Heritage
Foundation), provides several useful examples of Churchill's
rich language.
In 1919, Churchill
wrote of Lenin and Trotsky:
They seek
as the first condition of their being the overthrow and destruction
of all existing institutions and of every State and Government
now standing in the world. They too aim at a worldwide and international
league, but a league of the failures, the criminals, the unfit,
the mutinous, the morbid, the deranged and the distraught in every
land; and between them and such order of civilization as we
have been able to build up since the dawn of history there can,
as Lenin rightly proclaims, be neither truce nor pact?
Even worse,
at least from the perspective of the New York Times editorial
board, Shattan notes that "the barrage of invective unloosed
by Churchill against the Bolsheviks was unparalleled in modern British
political history." "'Criminality and animalism,' 'fungus,'
'cancer,' 'a plague bacillus,' 'a deadly and paralyzing sect,' 'a
barbarism ... devoured by vermin, racked by pestilence,' 'avowed
enemies of civilization,' 'criminals,' 'deranged and distraught,'
and 'subhuman' were among his choicer epithets."
The president's
language is wholly appropriate. In fact, it's Churchillian. The
phrase "dead or alive" communicates that the United States
is not mincing words or actions in pursuit of bin Laden and his
ilk. President Bush's statement is not in question, but the pettiness
of the New York Times certainly is.
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