[lbo-talk] Palin bubble losing air?

Jeffrey Fisher jeff.jfisher at gmail.com
Wed Sep 17 14:40:28 PDT 2008


On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 9:04 PM, Tayssir John Gabbour < tayssir.john at googlemail.com> wrote:


> On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 12:53 AM, John Thornton <jthorn65 at sbcglobal.net>
> wrote:
> >>>> "With profound gratitude and great humility, I accept your
> >>>> nomination for the presidency of the United States."
> >
> > Can someone tell me what is more inane about the beginning of this speech
> > than any of the other convention speeches?
>
> How do we perceive an orator who describes his own humbleness as
> "great"? Particularly right after using the word "profound" to
> describe his gratitude?

um, "great" as in "large"? like a "great lake"? not as in "catherine the great"?

anyway, since when has the rhetorical topos of humility not been, well, a topos. of course he does that. so did people like cicero and paul. i think if we simply complain about it being fake we are missing a lot of what's going on.


>
>
> If I tried accepting this as sensible public speaking, I'd probably
> feel the same cognitive dissonance as I would with Condoleeza Rice's
> statement that foreign forces should be withdrawn from Iraq -- as if
> US forces aren't foreign.
>

not the same thing, but sure, both are rhetorical moves.


>
>
> > It just seemed like standard US political stuff to me.
>

it seemed like standard classical rhetoric to me.


>
>
> Do you perceive Palin's speech that way too? If so, then I suppose you
> voice that opinion when people discuss her speech here, and that's
> certainly a sensible opinion. (But if you don't, has she transcended
> the everyday political world into a new realm of darkness?)
>
> Personally, I think Palin's nomination speech was more entertaining
> than all the other speeches, though I mentioned one of my concerns
> about it in an earlier post.

it was a good speech well delivered. there doesn't seem much argument about that.

j



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