Rhetorical sleight-of-hand.

Oregon Muse does his Morning Rant in the Ace of Spades blog.

“Hey look, everybody, the progs have invented a couple of new terms. The first is ‘BROWN-face’. It’s kind of like “blackface”, but its use is reserved for prog politicians in order to minimize any potential damage to their careers or reputations. See, ‘brownface’ is not as bad as ‘blackface’. This will come as good news to Justin Trudeau. You don’t ever want to be caught in ‘blackface’. But if there’s a photo of you in ‘brownface’, hey, it’s all good. If you’re a prog. Republicans, needless to say, will never be caught in brownface, only in the blackest of blackface.

“The second term the progressives have just made up is ‘credible accusation’. It’s been used extensively in the recent media coverage of those two NY Times hack reporters who set out to smear Brett Kavanaugh by resurrecting bogus charges that didn’t pass muster the first time around. In order to add rhetorical ‘oomph’ to the old, previously discarded accusations to make them look like new accusations, they got magically turned into ‘credible accusations.’ So, you might ask, what is the difference between an ‘accusation’ and a ‘credible accusation’? Well, a ‘credible accusation’ is much better than a standard, run-of-the-mill accusation. How so? Well, a ‘credible accusation’ is one that you should believe, that ought to be believed. Why? Because it’s ‘credible’.

“No one has ever said why exactly these accusations have suddenly become ‘credible’. Particularly since no new evidence has been introduced and none of the principal actors actually remember anything. It’s kind of like the 2004 election when the media kept referring to the Swift Boat veterans’ testimony about the character of John Kerry as ‘discredited’, as in ‘the discredited Swift Boat vets’, although I never saw any of the actual discrediting that supposedly took place. They were just assuming what they needed to prove. Or, more precisely, they wanted you to assume that what they needed to prove had already been proven. That, since they had used the word ‘discredited’, it had actually been ‘discredited’ (even though it really hadn’t).

“What it boils down to is that the latest round of accusation against Kavanaugh are ‘credible’ because a couple of progressive hack NY Times reporters say so.

“Progressive definitions of words are like progressive definitions of gender, i.e. fluid, amorphous, and, basically, whatever suits their purposes at the time. It’s just rhetorical sleight-of-hand.”