Reply #5: A Culture of Overstatement

[rwenos]

I sympathize with your frustration. Everybody nowadays feels they have to overstate things to such a shrill degree -- like I do when my wife and kid won't "listen to" me at the dinner table. As if shouting will help!

People seeking rhetorical power can't think of any way to make their point more forceful than to make the most extreme statements. "Obama is a terrorist." "Pelosi is a traitor."

Political rhetoric is better conducted with a scalpel than a meataxe, friends. The meataxe approach is what the other side does.