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Dana Milbank: Michele Bachmann, GOP squeaky wheel, ready to retire - The Washington Post:
"But for all her entertainment value, Bachmann has done more than any other elected official to inject false information into the national debate, contributing to a culture in which many conservatives detach themselves from reality. A study by the nonpartisan Center for Media and Public Affairs this week based on data from PolitiFact.com found that Republicans’ claims in recent months are three times more likely to be false than those of Democrats. The Post’s fact checker, Glenn Kessler, discovered that Bachmann told a higher percentage of whoppers than any other lawmaker."
'via Blog this'
Thursday, May 30, 2013
Monday, May 20, 2013
Welcome to the Rhetoric Goat!
Welcome!
Eric Covington and I started this blog in the Spring of 2010 as we prepared to see Sarah Palin speak at the first Tea Party National Convention in Nashville, Tn. Thanks to the generosity of then MTSU Associate Dean of Liberal Arts, Mark Byrnes, we had been able to purchase two tickets to the dinner and her keynote speech at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel. We started this blog as a place to talk about our ideas and refer others who might be interested in what we were studying, too.
This all grew out of a class project that developed in my COMM 4650 (Rhetorical theory, history, and criticism) class in the Spring of 2009. On April 15th, the first ever "Tea Party" rallies were held around the country, and I was fascinated - pretty soon everyone was. What on earth were they protesting? Why? What was their goal?
What immediately caught our attention were the anti-Obama signs that dominated these events. Was the Tea Party FOR something or were they just AGAINST newly elected President Obama?
I assigned the class to read Eric Hoffer's work on "the True Believer" and his theory of Mass Movements. We had some great discussions looking at the Tea Party as well as the "Hope" campaign of Obama. Did they fit the criteria Hoffer described? How so? Why or why not? And who cares, anyway?
We had also already discussed in class the Republican party's challenge to re-brand themselves following their defeat in the 2008 Presidential election. How would they use rhetoric to constitute a new identity? What would they include, what would they change, who would be the voices of leadership?
So naturally, these discussions led us to consider if the Tea Party was going to be the new face of the Republican party. Little did we know in the Spring of 2009 how our curiosity about these topics would become political reality in the U.S. throughout the summer at the HealthCare Town Hall meetings and then throughout the next year as the Congress debated Health Care Reform. And then, in the Fall of 2010, the Tea Party made its formal debut in American politics by capturing a number of Congressional seats.
So the initial insight that prompted me to involve my students in the study of this (then completely) new movement turned out to be amazingly prophetic. And long before the 2010 mid-term election, we had some insights and predictions gained through rhetorical criticism papers completed for the rhetoric class. Eric's paper - an analysis of Tea Party ideographs - won the top undergraduate paper award at TCA in 2009. He continued his research with me during an Independent Study in the Fall of 2009 and the formal paper he finished and submitted was accepted for presentation at the annual Theodore Clevenger Undergraduate Honors conference at the annual SSCA regional convention.
My own work was focused on the application of Hoffer's ideas to the Tea Party movement. First this required me to turn Hoffer's thoughts about audiences and rhetorical strategies into a theory of fanatical rhetoric. Then I had to determine how or if it fit the Tea Party movement (and later the OccupyWallStreet movement). This research and rhetorical theory development is what I am working on now and my papers working through this development have been competitively selected for three major regional conferences (SSCA and CSCA).
I was also interviewed for the NCA online journal, Communication Currents, in the Spring of 2011 about my theories and my perspective on the Tea Party and their "violence-flavored rhetoric" (which was my term for it). You can watch that interview here:
So throughout the years since we started it in 2010, this blog has become a "dumping ground" of sorts for things we/I found in research and internet journies that related to the study and the development of the fanatical rhetorical theory. We also share it with others who are interested in studying the Tea Party movement as a "library" of sources. It is certainly not complete nor does it even have any organization at this time; but the blog gets a significant amount of traffic every month, so somebody must find it useful.
If you search the archives you will find the actual blog posts I wrote along the way describing and explaining what we were seeing rhetorically in the Tea Party. Most of those posts were in early 2010, but there have been a number of them since then, commenting on signficant developments as the Tea Party gained power.
What tickles us is how right we were. Our insights may seem like "common sense" now, but they surely weren't in 2009-2010 when this study began. It's a useful reminder for us about following that "hunch" when it strikes. I thought this was going to be a huge rhetorical development in American politics, and it was. It still is.
It's not over. So stay tuned . . .
Feel free to leave us comments!
p.s. if you want to know the story behind the name, you can find it at the very beginning of the blog - February, 2010.
Eric Covington and I started this blog in the Spring of 2010 as we prepared to see Sarah Palin speak at the first Tea Party National Convention in Nashville, Tn. Thanks to the generosity of then MTSU Associate Dean of Liberal Arts, Mark Byrnes, we had been able to purchase two tickets to the dinner and her keynote speech at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel. We started this blog as a place to talk about our ideas and refer others who might be interested in what we were studying, too.
This all grew out of a class project that developed in my COMM 4650 (Rhetorical theory, history, and criticism) class in the Spring of 2009. On April 15th, the first ever "Tea Party" rallies were held around the country, and I was fascinated - pretty soon everyone was. What on earth were they protesting? Why? What was their goal?
What immediately caught our attention were the anti-Obama signs that dominated these events. Was the Tea Party FOR something or were they just AGAINST newly elected President Obama?
I assigned the class to read Eric Hoffer's work on "the True Believer" and his theory of Mass Movements. We had some great discussions looking at the Tea Party as well as the "Hope" campaign of Obama. Did they fit the criteria Hoffer described? How so? Why or why not? And who cares, anyway?
We had also already discussed in class the Republican party's challenge to re-brand themselves following their defeat in the 2008 Presidential election. How would they use rhetoric to constitute a new identity? What would they include, what would they change, who would be the voices of leadership?
So naturally, these discussions led us to consider if the Tea Party was going to be the new face of the Republican party. Little did we know in the Spring of 2009 how our curiosity about these topics would become political reality in the U.S. throughout the summer at the HealthCare Town Hall meetings and then throughout the next year as the Congress debated Health Care Reform. And then, in the Fall of 2010, the Tea Party made its formal debut in American politics by capturing a number of Congressional seats.
So the initial insight that prompted me to involve my students in the study of this (then completely) new movement turned out to be amazingly prophetic. And long before the 2010 mid-term election, we had some insights and predictions gained through rhetorical criticism papers completed for the rhetoric class. Eric's paper - an analysis of Tea Party ideographs - won the top undergraduate paper award at TCA in 2009. He continued his research with me during an Independent Study in the Fall of 2009 and the formal paper he finished and submitted was accepted for presentation at the annual Theodore Clevenger Undergraduate Honors conference at the annual SSCA regional convention.
My own work was focused on the application of Hoffer's ideas to the Tea Party movement. First this required me to turn Hoffer's thoughts about audiences and rhetorical strategies into a theory of fanatical rhetoric. Then I had to determine how or if it fit the Tea Party movement (and later the OccupyWallStreet movement). This research and rhetorical theory development is what I am working on now and my papers working through this development have been competitively selected for three major regional conferences (SSCA and CSCA).
I was also interviewed for the NCA online journal, Communication Currents, in the Spring of 2011 about my theories and my perspective on the Tea Party and their "violence-flavored rhetoric" (which was my term for it). You can watch that interview here:
So throughout the years since we started it in 2010, this blog has become a "dumping ground" of sorts for things we/I found in research and internet journies that related to the study and the development of the fanatical rhetorical theory. We also share it with others who are interested in studying the Tea Party movement as a "library" of sources. It is certainly not complete nor does it even have any organization at this time; but the blog gets a significant amount of traffic every month, so somebody must find it useful.
If you search the archives you will find the actual blog posts I wrote along the way describing and explaining what we were seeing rhetorically in the Tea Party. Most of those posts were in early 2010, but there have been a number of them since then, commenting on signficant developments as the Tea Party gained power.
What tickles us is how right we were. Our insights may seem like "common sense" now, but they surely weren't in 2009-2010 when this study began. It's a useful reminder for us about following that "hunch" when it strikes. I thought this was going to be a huge rhetorical development in American politics, and it was. It still is.
It's not over. So stay tuned . . .
Feel free to leave us comments!
p.s. if you want to know the story behind the name, you can find it at the very beginning of the blog - February, 2010.
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
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