Re: Pages 63-64

People who follow Obama with sparkles in their eyes try to bring you into what is a very intense and frightening cult-like following - a childish trance-like religious experience wherein you give up all resistance and submit to Obama love and it fulfills you completely

Note the generalized you which serves to confound the reader with an abstracted "everyman" undergoing a "typical" reaction to this experience.

This "you" is often contrasted with "they," and is never directly named so as to allow generalizations to substitute for specifics which could be proven or disproven.

The critical reader will already be asking the questions, "Who?" and "When?" Furthermore such generalizations about behavior frequently fail the test when the author is asked to "own the experience" and substitute an "I" statement in its stead. Accurate and substantiated observations can transition from the abstract "you" or "they" to the specific "I." False generalizations and false evidence can't.

As logical human beings, everything has a logical explanation.

Now there's an awkward sentence fragment...

However the hallmark of a critical and rational mind is a refusal to manufacture information to fill gaps in knowledge. Perhaps everything does have a logical explanation, but that doesn't mean that the knowledge thereof will ever become known. And baseless speculation will dull the apprehension of truth.

Furthermore, it is not required for the motive to be logical for the explanation to be comprehended logically. Humans are oftentimes irrational and frequently engage in counterproductive as well as nonproductive behavior.

Without accepting the unfounded assertion that Obama uses hypnosis; the argument that efficacy is proven by the continued application of a method is daft. To suggest that all human beings are logical enough to discontinue a method which doesn't work flies in the face of history and experience. An examination of medical quackery should suffice to demonstrate that many treatments which have been proven useless continue to have a following.

At this point the author reveals an anti-youth anti-intellectual bias.

The way in which the section peters-out seem to evince poor planning on the part of the author and a refusal to revise his assertion to even suit his own convoluted illogic.

He wished to explain away Obama's apparent appeal to young people and "more educated people."

But the author then gets so wrapped up in equating youth with a lack of experience and exposure to ideas ( never mind the fact that age doesn't automatically confer critical thinking skills, or guarantee the exposure to the evidence required to refute a given assertion ) that he is then nearly at a loss to explain away the appeal of Obama to those whose education and reading may make them more likely to see through falsehoods. The best he can do is disparage the creative imagination and equate a responsive mind to hyperactive one.

Again, he has covered his bases no matter how illogically. Those without an education are swayed by such techniques. Those with an education are engaged by such techniques. Even though he refuses to offer evidence of the use or efficacy of such techniques in Obama's public speaking, he has to argue that he's right for both A and not-A in order to dismiss such broad-based support.

Dante