Conflation Quotes
After the invasion, much of the intelligence upon which America relied on Invading Iraq turned out to be completely wrong. It turned out that the Vice President at least, a major supporter of the invasion, had a role in “shaping” the intelligence and analysis to achieve a policy objective.
William Z. Foster, the 1928 communist presidential candidate, was arrested because his party’s leaflet contained this “inflammatory” slogan.
“Arsenal of Democracy” is the famous FDR phrase whereby America was able to provide weapons for the other democracies to fight Fascism. At the time, the United States had the greatest manufacturing capability of the world. When Gingrich made this quotation, much manufacturing that had been done in America had moved offshore. However, one area that did not move offshore was military weapons manufacturing where the United States manufacturing capability was thriving but America was the largest arms manufacturer in the world and exported much of its weapons. This quotation is an example of a political technique called “conflation.” Gingrich took an area where there was legitimate concern about the nation’s loss of manufacturing and implied that the problem was affecting our military and defense capability as well which was not do at all. However, while most Americans knew of the manufacturing job loss, they did not know that the defense manufacturing was the strongest in the world. So they became even more alarmed at the problem of general manufacturing loss.
This quotation is a classic case of conflation. The politician who is asked about the dangers of assault weapons and who is opposed to gun control, observes that a pencil could kill someone and that a terrorist MIGHT attack with a pencil. Therefore she conflates the semiautomatic rifles like AK47s with pencils. No one would think of legislation making it difficult to obtain pencils; therefore she makes the gun control efforts appear trivial and silly. The problem is that many Americans are killed every year by weapons designed for assaulting in battle and killing an enemy. No one can find the a case where anyone ever assaulted and killed another person by stabbing him in the heart with a pencil.
