This is a post I made on Matt Bai’s blog a few days ago.

“I think it unfortunate that race, once mostly a subtext in the campaign, has now moved from the background to the foreground. Obama had positioned himself above the ugly fray of race with his message of a unity that transcended differences. Now, thanks mostly to the Clintons, and their paraliptical rhetorical ploys (the invoking of a subject while denying it should be invoked that is usually employed for thinly disguised ad hominem attacks)race has reared its ugly head.
They know that the mere foregrounding of race will work against Obama, because it will convert a submerged subtext into a key text in the primaries, and thus work against his message of inclusiveness. It is an ominous development for Obama, since it tries to lump him together with past African-American race-centric themed candidates. Further, it will help to transmute latent racism into an issue that will be one of the pivots around which the campaigns could turn.”

However, notwithstanding this scurrilous usage of rhetoric, we should not be too quick to jettison its full exercise because, as Aristotle noted a few years back, it deals with the probable and not the certain. No human endeavor can escape its clutches since omniscience tends to escape the grasp of most humans, excepting Pat Roberson and a few others. And, in particular, because politics is the House of Rhetoric given that the facts underdetermine argumentative conclusions, we are reduced to using the persuasive conceits of rhetoric. Although we can and should avoid its darker ad hominem side.

Given the ineluctablility of rhetoric due to a paucity of apodicity, perhaps there is something to Nietzsche’s marching army of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms after all?

Modernists and classicists to the parapets…! Hark! The post-modernists are weaponizing their flea-infested semantical fantasies.