Bush’s Refrain on Iraq Joined by a Smaller and Smaller Chorus

To illustrate the progress in Iraq, Bush ticked off statistics on the Iraqi security forces (200 operations in two weeks), the number of Iraqi battalions (more than 130, covering 30,000 square miles), the number of tips (4,000 in December), the number of weapons caches and bomb plants found (1,800), and the amount spent to defeat improvised explosives ($3.3 billion). He declared that the Iraqi police academy “will include many, many more Sunnis.”

Wait a minute. This is The Shotgun Approach. The strategery by which poorly prepared college or post-collegiate students attempt to pass an exam by blowing a large quantity of chaff in the hopes that enough will stick for a passing grade.

Bush often does this – busts out the numbers, makes a relentlessly positive progress report, and all but lays it out in perfect bullet points on a Powerpoint screen (maybe that’s what’s really up on the TelePrompter).

I just never recognized it for what it really was until now.

We believe the reason for the high failure rate is because examinees have failed to understand the scope and complexity of the test and have relied on incomplete and misleading study material, plus they generally use a shotgun approach in preparing for the exam. Our workbooks/CDs and workshops offer a focused approach instead of the shotgun approach.

4. Be pertinent. Some students use a shotgun approach to essay items. They try to write down everything they know about a topic in hopes that something they say will answer the question. You may lose some credit for including information that is true but not pertinent.

This last one is especially good, including the bit about right and wrong answers:

Don’t turn in work that you know is wrong but pretend that you think it is right. It is far better not to finish a problem than to continue on and produce a wrong answer, or make some other error to compensate so as to get a reasonable-looking answer; that just makes you look like you really don’t know what you are doing. No answer at all is better than an answer you know to be wrong. You should say something like: “I know that something has gone wrong at this point, but I can’t figure out what” and should also say why you think something is not right, and what you would have done if you could have continued on. There is no shame in admitting you don’t know how to do something. On the other hand, if it appears that you think what you have done is right, even though it isn’t, I will take off credit for it, even if you end up with the “right” answer.

Don’t turn in several different answers to the same problem, hoping one will be right. Some students use this “shotgun” approach, hoping that at least one answer will be correct and that I’ll ignore the others. I won’t. If you write four answers and only one is right, that’s probably worth only 25% of the points, because 75% of what you said was wrong.

Every time this Administration wants to pound the message, pound the “rally base” button, and pound the untruth into an uninterested and unengaged populace, they keep repeating the same “drinking game” snippets of message: stay on course, the Iraqis stand up and we’ll stand down, hard work, war on terror mantras. Columnists like Molly Ivins have been wise to this for a while now.

Over and over again, Bush and his flacks bust out the statistics, which nowadays are often cynically parrotted back to them by journalists, as was done in the Washington Post article about the attempt to shore up support for the war in Iraq:

There were numbers the president did not cite: 73 (the minimum number of Iraqis killed in the past two days), 2,308 (the overall number of American troops dead) and 10 percent (the reduction in troops in Iraq announced by Britain).

The point is, they all take their cues from the Old Man, who’s much less the old man than his old man was, and he never really will be the Old Man owing to that unfortunate lapse in his military “service.” And this rhetorical style is the same as it was when he was bluffing his way through college: get somebody to pull some statistics out of their ass for him, and spew ’em all out before he forgets.

That’s it. No analysis, no critical thinking, no compare and contrast, and only rosy projections, not hard and fast conclusions. It’s the Shotgun Approach to governance. Spit out the stats, ask no questions, memorize enough generalizations to offer as “answers” to get you out the door and into the weak Washington sunshine, and onto the chopper for Andrews and home.

We thought it was funny a couple of weeks ago when Cheney demonstrated his prowess with a shotgun. Unfortunately, the Leader of the Free World has been blowing smoke like a Yalie frosh legacy the whole time he’s been in office.

Stupid of us all never to have noticed.