On Quoting Out of Context and the Right-Wing Smear Machine

By On July 20, 2012 · 59 Comments · In Current Events

Suppose I wrote the following in an article:

The most charitable reconstruction of Adolf Hitler’s argument for killing Jews goes, more or less, like this. Jews are equivalent to infected people in all of those zombie virus apocalypse movies. In such unfortunate emergency circumstances, the best thing one can do is kill the infected people, however sad and gruesome that may be. If Jews are going to destroy the world the way I Am Legend’s zombies threaten to destroy the world, it might be justifiable to kill them.

Now, suppose after writing this, the right-wing smear machine posted a series of articles quoting me as follows:

Jason Brennan said, “Jews are equivalent to infected people in all of those zombie apocalypse movies. The best thing one can do is kill the infected people, however sad and gruesome that may be. If Jews are going to destroy the world, it might be justifiable to kill them.”

Notice how quoting me out of context changes things. It makes it seem as though I endorse a view I did not actually endorse. If people quoted me out of context and then reacted with outrage, that would show a rather significant intellectual and moral failing on their part. If people demanded that I apologize, well, I can’t say here what my response would be.

Now, here’s a real life example. Obama said:

If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own…

If you are successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet, so then all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that, when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.

The right-wing smear machine quotes this out of context, as follows:

If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.

Wow, notice how quoting out of context changes the apparent meaning of those two sentences. In context, the sentences mean: If you own a business, you relied upon background institutions, infrastructure, and help from others to build that business. Your success depended upon many of the rest of us and on government. You didn’t create everything from scratch. The bolded “that” refers to “this unbelievable American System” and “roads and bridges”. This is what Obama actually said.

Out of context, the sentences seem to mean: You didn’t build your business; someone else did. Quoting him out of context makes it seem like the bolded “that” refers to your business.

ADDENDUM: In case you didn’t see it, I criticize Obama’s actual argument here: http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2012/07/the-implicit-errors-in-debts-to-society-arguments/

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  • londondave

    LAME.

    You want smear machines. Check ABC’s Brian Ross.

    • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1702318862 Jason Brennan

      Sure, the Left has its own smear machines. What’s your point?

      • londondave

        You can dance like 20 angels on the head of a pin, but Obama ABSOLUTELY believes that the GOVERNMENT is responsible for your success.

        Well guess what? Ted Bundy didn’t kill people!

        Government built the roads he drove his VW Beetle along so he could kidnap those women who died.

        So thank the government for the roads that help serial killers kill folks!

        Thank you Obama.

        • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1702318862 Jason Brennan

          The overwhelming majority of responses I have seen to this quotation misrepresent Obama. They make it seem like he believes an extreme position that he does not in fact believe, rather than the more mundane position he actually articulated.

          • James

            That hardly seems to be the case. If “that” refers to the system, then the next sentence would make no sense. Someone helped a business owner build the American system? Your interpretationis hardly plausible and more befitting of Martin bashir. “That” obviously refers to “business.”

          • Richard

            What’s your basis for saying that President Obama doesn’t believe in “spreading the wealth around”? Isn’t that the “extreme” position that others attribute to him?

        • mike

          And as has been pointed out, Obama didn’t create that speech. He didn’t invent those words someone else did. Did he make that microphone? Did he build the building it was given in? etc. It’s a stupid statement. Of course people didn’t do things on their own. But it is a choice between voluntary interaction and coercion.

  • Sarah S

    It would be nice if I could believe that the problem here was a pronoun reference issue that has been picked up and torqued by the right wing smear machine. And as I am no fan of smear machines from any side of the aisle, or any quadrant of the diamond, I’d be pleased if this were true.

    However, the “right wing smear machine” is reading the comment as written. The nearest referent for the pronoun “that” is “a business.” While one could possibly argue that Obama meant this “that” to refer to the greater societal infrastructure, this requires some pretty fancy footwork. The sentence, as spoken, does not use the pronoun to refer to the infrastructure. It refers to “a business.” The grammar is–without any torturous hijinks or chicanery–firmly on the side of those who see the sentence as an attack on business owners.

    In a greater context, I don’t think this kind of wrangling over the grammar matters very much. What is offensive is Obama’s suggestion that business owners believe that they don’t owe nobody nothing nohow and that they can and should be forced to “pay back” by the State.

    *That* is the problem.

    • Jeff Riggenbach

      If you strip the sentence in question out of its original context, then “the grammar is . . . firmly on the side of those who see the sentence as an attack on business owners.” The problem is, Obama never spoke this sentence as a stand-alone sentence. This should be evident to anyone who is neither illiterate nor engaged in special right wing pleading.

      JR

    • adrianratnapala

      Yep. Even with the full context it sounds like he is saying just what the “right wing smear” accuses him of. A more charitable – and I think correct – interpretation is that he was just being sloppy.

      Not just sloppy about words, about ideas too. For some people (especially here on the interwebs) the observation that we all depend on civilisation’s fruits merges mushily into some vague idea individual achievements are not, well, individual.

    • mike

      Thank you Sarah! I’m horrible with grammar. But, as you said, that isn’t really the issue. To say that no one builds a business on their own is obvious. The president makes the gigantic leap to say that government must facilitate this interaction is ridiculous. Cooperative voluntary interaction has helped facilitate business growth. Coerced exchange will destroy business growth (on net).

      • adrianratnapala

        I too am terrible at grammar. Especially in blog comments.

        However, I take issue with Sarah and her pronouns. “That” is not a pronoun. It is a kind of article. (But “it” isn’t an article; it is a pronoun).

        • Sarah S

          “That” is a relative pronoun or an article, depending on how it is used.

          • adrianratnapala

            You are right. The sentence could have been “If you have a wife, you didn’t build her“.

            On the other hand the sentence could be “If you have a wife, you didn’t didn’t build that gracious lady”. In which case “that” is back to being an article, even though it is only an extension of “If you have a wife, you didn’t build that”. Which is not so much ungrammatical as it is bad for a man’s health.

  • http://twitter.com/ChrisTozzo Christopher Tozzo

    Your own counterexample actually demonstrates, quite powerfully, that the Obama quote is not in any way at all “out of context.”

    The word “that” (regardless of how Clintonially parsed), the clause containing the word, the sentence containing the clause, the paragraph containing the sentence, and the speech containing the paragraph all convey exactly the same message.

    It’s this fact, that the quote is so horrifically “in context,” that gives it such traction.

  • sperbonzo

    Actually, taking the statement in the FULL context of everything Obama has written and stated, it’s obvious to me that he has in fact been correctly quoted. He beleives that government creates things for people and should have primacy over private citizens and private business. It is also correct in following his view that those businesses “owe” the rest of us a part of their profits.

  • Dan

    I didn’t realize BHL contained experts on the semantics of anaphoric reference! Anyway it seems to me that the “right wing smear machine” reading is a perfectly reasonable one. If “that” referred to “roads and bridges”, mentioned in the previous sentence, we’d expect it to be in the plural — “those”. To get the singular referent “the American system”, you have to go two sentences back; it seems much more plausible and parsimonious to say that the referent is “your business”, which is mentioned in the very sentence the anaphor is used. Also, if your reading is correct, why would “you didn’t build that” need the restrictor “if you’ve got a business” — surely anyone, with or without a business, didn’t build the system etc.

    • Richard

      Good point, Dan. It isn’t JUST business builders that use teachers, roads, and bridges… everyone does, successful or not. What’s the justification for charging the successful people more to use them? In absolute dollars, or even in percent of income…

      But “successful people” – a substitute for “the rich” – ALREADY pay more, on both an absolute dollar and percentage of income basis. What’s the argument for making the already progressive tax system even more progressive? I’d really accept these kinds of arguments more readily if those who advance them stated what they believe to be the limit. I’m not sure it’s even 100% of income, I think those who focus on ‘equality of results’ really mean to tax assets until everyone is equally poor, but the only tool they have is the income tax.

  • Fernando Teson

    I can’t see why the in-context version is any better than the out-of-content version.

  • Fernando Teson

    context

  • http://www.facebook.com/fritz.hayek Fritz Hayek

    Are you really parsing Obama’s statement, or are you defending its obviously statist thrust? It is a defense of collectivism and an attack on individual initiative. End of story.

  • Morten

    Still, quoting him out of context makes him seem like a crazy person to be disregarded. Quoting him in context reveals how dangerous hiw thinking really is, and how he thinks he is justified in demanding your cooperation by force becasue you didn’t create the entire world yourself.

  • DavidCheatham

    I don’t think the word ‘that’ refers to ‘roads and bridges’, which would be ‘those’, as others have pointed out. I think the word ‘that’, those two sentences, or at least the last sentence, refers to ‘this unbelievable American system we have’.

    You can tell by the next sentence ‘Somebody else made that happen.’
    People do not make roads and bridges ‘happen’. Roads and bridges do not ‘happen’ at all, they simply exist. The building does happen, but that’s a rather roundabout way to talk about that.
    Neither, I must point out, do businesses ‘happen’. The _building_ of a business ‘happens’, but that would mean he said ‘You not only didn’t build it.’ in the first sentence, and then the second sentence says ‘Someone else made the building of it happen’.
    What? I mean, that makes grammatical sense, but what sort of nonsense would that mean? Not only are business owners not responsible for their own businesses’s success, they didn’t even cause their own business to exist at all? They think they filed the paperwork, but really someone else filed it?
    No. It’s probably the American system that they did not build, and it’s certainly the American system that someone else made happen.
    Which means that Obama or his speechwriter needs to take a basic grammar class in pronoun reference, or, more likely, Obama should read the sentences in his speech in the right order.

    Basically, I think it was supposed to go something like this: Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system we have that allowed you to thrive, if you’ve got a business. Somebody invested in roads and bridges, you didn’t build those.

    And Obama realized he said that wrong, putting ‘if you’ve got a business’ in the wrong place and tried to fix it by tacking on ‘Somebody else made that happen.’ to the end. Or perhaps there was supposed to be something before that, too.

    What I don’t understand is why the administration hasn’t come forward with a clarification of what they meant to say.

    Edit: Rereading, that first sentence of my hypothetical sounds much saner, and fits the pattern better, if you flip the clauses around: If you’ve got a business, somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system we have that allowed you to thrive.

    • DavidCheatham

      Incidentally, having now watched the actual clip, I think it’s worth pointing that he did _not_ say ‘If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.’

      It’s not separate sentences, or at least not where the transcript makes them out to be. He doesn’t pause at all between ‘Somebody invested in roads and bridges, if you’ve got a business…’, _then_ he pauses, and says ‘that, you didn’t build that, somebody else made that happen’.

      The most honest way of transcribing this would be ”Somebody invested in roads and bridges, if you’ve got a business.That, you didn’t build that, somebody else made that happen’.

      I suspect it wasn’t transcribed that way because that way it becomes obvious that he screwed up somewhere in all of that. (Which might not even be on purpose…transcription often cleans up small verbal gaffs.)

      But it becomes much more obvious what ‘that’ refers to is debatable when you realize that sentence had no nouns in it at all. That sentence had to be talking about something in the previous incomplete sentence, which had both ‘roads and bridges’ and ‘business’.

      Incidentally, I still think the second ‘that’ is a reference back to ‘the american system’, because that’s where his brain ended up while recovering. I.e., ‘I will finish up the sentence I glitched on, then circle back to my main point and restart from there’.

  • Richard

    Jason, the bigger problem is that President Obama makes the general claim that if you build upon the work of others, those others are entitled to (an apparently unlimited portion of) your profits. Since everyone everywhere builds upon the work of others, he seems to be making a claim for … well, I’m not sure I’m using the terms correctly, but it sure sounds like something more communist/socialist to me. Or worse, since it feels like the teacher, the road builder, etc. could all claim a portion of the profits, even if the sum of all the portions is greater than 100% of your profits.

  • Floccina

    What rubs me the wrong way about the speech as a whole is the attitude that because a person used public assets like roads they are to submit to any level of taxation without complaining because the owe it to society. I think that Government should collect as much taxes it needs to fund public works and some level charity. Some Democrats seem to believe that government should collect as much taxes at the top incomes as possible as long as there is still incentive to work.

  • Thomasy

    Similarly, when Obama said “If you’re successful, you didn’t get there on your own,” “there” doesn’t refer to “successful” but instead to something else, like America, or roads and bridges.
    The will to misread.

  • Marcus_V

    I think Obama is being quoted out of context, in more or less the same way that Romney was being quoted out of context when he said he likes being able to fire people. In context, Obama was at least plausibly talking about roads and infrastructure; in context, Romney was at least plausibly talking about firing incompetents.

    I don’t put much weight on the precise phrasings, because they were both live speeches given on the campaign trail. Even prepared speeches have a way of taking on a life of their own– they’re revised by multiple hands, and then delivered by candidates who have been running political public-speaking marathons. I also don’t think Obama is under the illusion that there are 57 states in the US, for instance– the man was clearly exhausted when he said that. I put weight on exact phrasings when they come up over and over again, or when they’re in prepared, vetted, campaign documents.

    But I do put weight on the general thrust of arguments put forth in live speeches, though, and the general thrust of Obama’s arguments are an open-ended claim on the fruits of my labor, just because I’ve used infrastructure or taken advantage of a government program.

    As a taxpayer, I’m not fond of the Obama campaign’s palming the card of how the government “made that happen,” which is to say, with my money or my parents’ money before me.

    As an individualist, I’m not fond of this unilateral revamp of the social contract into a social tar pit from which there is neither escape nor even partial withdrawal.

    And as a libertarian, I’m not fond of the idea that only government can make these things happen. I’m not so absolutist that I think the government can never, or should never, provide services, but I’ll be damned if I roll over and accept the argument that *only* the government can do it, except for some special cases such as national defense.

  • http://www.facebook.com/fritz.hayek Fritz Hayek

    And another thing. How could anyone seriously assert that Obama’s “that” refers to “roads and bridges” and other tax-funded things, when the very sentence in which he utters his “that” is staring us in the face. Read the sentence as it’s reproduced in the official source (http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/07/13/remarks-president-campaign-event-roanoke-virginia): “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that.”

    “That,” in this context, is a pronoun, the intended antecedent of which can only be “business.” Why? Because the clause in which “that” occurs is an unambiguous reference to “If you’ve got a business.”

    Fair-mindedness is admirable, but ill-advised when one is dealing with slippery characters like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Give them the benefit of the doubt, and they will give you the shaft.

    • http://www.facebook.com/fritz.hayek Fritz Hayek

      And the next sentence reads “Somebody else made that happen.” Put it all together and it is quite clear that Obama is denigrating the efforts and accomplishments of businesspersons. It may be legitimate to say that (almost) nothing is accomplished (these days) by individuals working on their own. But Obama is trying, not so subtly, to make a case for redistributionism, on the implicit premise that the fruits of a collective enterprise should be shared on some basis other than market valuations of the value of individual contributions. It is (or should be) obvious that Obama’s agenda is the advancement of collectivist statism. I will credit him for sincerity, but his sincerity only underscores the fact that he has spent his life in isolation from the real world of enterprise.

  • http://www.facebook.com/robert.lallier2 Robert Lallier

    You’re erecting a straw man, on this one. Even if we stretch grammar and give Obama the doubt that your bolded “that” refers to “social infrastructure” without which businesses could not thrive, we still have the exact same argument: regardless of what two parties contract with each other to do, a mystical social contract brings in millions of other nebulously defined parties who are somehow “stakeholders” in the deal and who deserve their recompense for… WHAT, precisely? Hmm? Wanna know what people really mean when they invoke this argument? Ayn Rand identified it some time ago in her writings. It is the same argument made by extortionists: because “we” refrain from destroying the social infrastructure and your business, you owe us. Note for the cowardly extortionists: refraining from destroying is not a value. The argument is not offering value for value it is demanding value for refraining from destroying. In other words, it is a demand for something for nothing.

  • http://www.facebook.com/robert.lallier2 Robert Lallier

    You know, Bleeding Heart, this was a really bad post. Even the most die hard “Progressives,” “Liberals,” “Democratic Socialists,” etc. etc. with half a brain would not have attempted to split grammatical hairs and torture logic as severely as this post does to find some redemption in Obama’s words. It just isn’t there. Obama was spouting pure Marxian material determinism no matter how you slice it. He deserves even more opprobrium than he’s getting for this, not less.

    • http://twitter.com/gshevlin gshevlin

      I grew up under socialism (or the tail end of it) and I studied enough politics over the years. Barack Obama is neither a Marxist or a socialist. Most people in the USA wouldn’t know Marxism or Socialism if it fell on them. The words are empty slogans in the context of US political discourse.

  • http://www.facebook.com/robert.lallier2 Robert Lallier

    “Free markets and social justice”? OH, there’s your problem. “Social justice” is a floating abstraction and an oxymoron. “Justice” is attributing the proper consequences of his actions to the actor responsible. Ultimately, it is ONLY individuals who think, decide, and ACT. Justice is rendering to the individual, the consequences of his own actions to the extent he is responsible for those forseeable consequences. INjustice is holding other, non-deciders and non-actors responsible for the actions of another acting individual. In other words it is the epitome of INjustice to hold some group nebulously defined or arbitrarilly assigned, responsible for the actions of one or more acting individuals. It would be “social justice” to hold all dark-skinned people or all Jewish people responsible for the actions of some individual or group within those classifications. To sum up: justice is not social. You seem to have a problem with logic and grammar.

  • http://www.facebook.com/david.hanley David Hanley

    I’m no fan of the right wing, but i think they got this quote correct. I think he is saying you didn’t build your business, and the infrastructure is an example of why. My left wing friends certainly interpret it that way…

  • good_in_theory

    The willingness to misread Obama’s quote here in the comments is sort of astounding. Prior to reading them I would have though Brennan’s account was non-controversial. Bizarre.

  • Pingback: Obama’s Big Lie « Politics & Prosperity

  • Sean II

    The question should not be about what Obama actually said, because really, who cares what emerges from the mouth of that Stepford Statist? The question should be about what he and his supporter actually believe.

    Michael Kinsley had it right. The reason why we’re all so hungry for political gaffes is because they give us the rare opportunity to catch a candidate in the act of saying something he actually means. Okay, so maybe Obama didn’t actually commit a full and genuine gaffe in this case. Big deal.

    We who are lied to every day have the right to jump the gun whenever we hear a whisper of something that might be the truth.

    And what is the truth? What does Obama believe? As far as anyone can tell, he is aware of no distinction between rent-seeking and value creation, he has no concept of spontaneous order, expresses no preference for voluntary transactions, holds no respect for any private economic rights, and is generally contemptuous of any human behavior that is not explicitly leader-directed.

    So if this trivial incident gives people a chance to speak about these things, if it gives them an excuse to talk in concrete terms about something most of us already know in the abstract, if this is what starts a discussion about Obama’s apparently complete ignorance of economics, then so be it.

    • http://twitter.com/gshevlin gshevlin

      As a general rule, I start to become skeptical as soon as I read any response that contains an ad hominem or a sneer in the first sentence. Your use of “Stepford Statist”, while cute, is big enough to hook a Great White, and correctly suggests that the rest of your posting is merely a standard strawman-polluted anti-Obama whine.

      • Sean II

        Hey, just because I throw in some little touch of mirth doesn’t mean I’m less than serious. I’m sure you have more to say, beyond simply labeling my comment a “standard whine”.

        What part did you disagree with? Do you see any evidence that Obama understands a concept like spontaneous order? If a reporter suddenly asked him to explain the difference between queueing and pricing, do you really think he could do it? Could he give an example of comparative advantage? Would he know the meaning of the broken window fallacy?

        Be honest. And remember, we’re talking about a man who lets himself be described as the leader who “manages” the U.S. economy. Can you cite anything in his public utterances that shows him making use of these or similar concepts of economics?

        • good_in_theory

          I really love how libertarians seem to think that things like “spontaneous order” “opportunity cost” and “comparative advantage” are arcane secrets of which silly harvard law professors are just too ignorant to know anything about.

          Your comment says much more about what you think of Obama than it does about what Obama thinks.

          • Sean II

            I’m not saying those concepts are secrets, I’m saying those concepts are not known or understood by the current president of the United States. If they were arcane secrets, I could hardly hold his ignorance against him.

            By the way, you do know they don’t teach economics at law school, right? What law school teaches might be thought of as the opposite of economics: the idea that behavior can be changed simply by means of writing and enforcing more rules.

            Here’s a perfect example. When Obama said: “If you like your current health insurance plan, your can keep it” back in 2009, he was thinking like a lawyer. After all, he didn’t DECREE that anyone should lose his current insurance plan, so why should it happen?

            Had he understood economics, he would have known that wasn’t his promise to make, since he can’t control how people and firms would respond to the new law. And in fact events made him a liar almost immediately, as marginal providers departed the insurance market soon after the affordable care act passed passed.

            Why do you suppose he made that promise, unless he didn’t know any better?

  • Xavier M

    I think there is a slight difference between the Obama example and your analogy. For it is possible with the truncated Obama quote to guess that he meant that you do not build a business alone from scratch without any cooperation or external benefit at any stage. Indeed that is how I had interpreted the truncated quote before I heard about the context, thinking that it was just not well put but that it was highly improbable he meant what the memes circulating on the net suggest.

    On the other hand, in the “Jews infection” example, there is no way to understand the truncated quote in any way which does not make you look like you endorse it. By the way, not that you’re claiming something else, but it’s worth pointing out that this kind of smears are not particularly “right-wing”. One can see hear or read that virtually anywhere from the left, the right, the center and beyond, even from libertarians sometimes :)

  • SentientTaxPayer

    If you’ve got a successful attack on innocent people at a movie theater, you didn’t do that. Somebody else made that happen. Consider the roads, the Internet and whatnot. It’s time for felons to give their fair share. Lots of others who helped along the way also want free housing, food and medical care. Why not donate four years from your sentence to Obama, it’s the only way he’s going to get them.

  • efgd

    Absolutely brilliant. Truth is if more people read things for themselves – the original that is – less people would be gullible to misinterpretation, misinformation and disinformation.

  • Gina Patton

    I would like to point out that your example of an out-of-context statement actually supports the “right-wing smear machine” (more about that later) response. To say “the most charitable reconstruction of Adolf Hitler’s argument for killing Jews goes, more or less, like this”
    does not substantively change what follows, as it reflects a mind-set so warped — in containing a premise that there can be a “charitable” view of an argument for genocide — that the average person with half a heart would reject out of hand before even arriving at the rest. Quoting the rest out of context might change the degree of offense, but not the kind, because most people would find any attempt to find a “charitable” reconstruction of genocide deeply offensive. The Obama comments are similar in that any way you slice and dice or ponder what “is” is, you come to the same arrogant progressive desire to redistribute the fruit of one’s labor. No one is confused.

    I would also like to suggest that your use of the phrase “right-wing smear machine” to characterize the negative response to Obama’s words is itself a smear and a mischaracterization of the views and motives of a great number of people.

  • MARK_D_FRIEDMAN

    Jason,
    I don’t claim any special expertise in grammar, and I can’t read Obama’s soul, but if he didn;t mean what he is commonly understood to have meant, there is an easy answer. Obama or his spokesperson could publically say something like: “Of course I didn’t mean that businesspeople are responsible for their own success; I was merely ponnting out that there are other things involved…” To my knowledge, no such clarification has been issued. If I am wrong, maybe you can quote it for me. In the absence of such a clarification I am inclined to believe that his political oponents understood him correctly.

    • good_in_theory

      Since when do politicians waste their time clarifying every misinterpretation liable to be made by the media?

      • MARK_D_FRIEDMAN

        Well, gee, I dunno, maybe when one of their ambiguous statements is being exploited like hell by their opponent.

        • good_in_theory

          His opponents have been ‘exploiting the hell’ out of any ambiguity they can use to call Obama a “socialist” for the past 4+ years. Such stupidities no longer (if they ever did) warrant response.

          • MARK_D_FRIEDMAN

            Your absolutely right. Like everyone else in society, he too is a victim.

          • good_in_theory

            What are you talking about?

            Not responding to stupid blogosphere spin has nothing to do with “victimhood”. The only “victims” here are those who think they are owed an explanation for a completely trivial gaffe.

          • MARK_D_FRIEDMAN

            Since Obama has now done EXACTLY what I suggested that he should do, I guess it is now pretty damn clear that (contrary to all you have said) he DID think it was worth clarifying his meaning.. See here: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/07/20/obama_you_didnt_build_that_comment_has_turned_into_a_bogus_issue.html

          • good_in_theory

            I never said Obama would or wouldn’t think it was worth clarifying his meaning. And his clarifying his meaning neither refutes the claim that politicians do not clarify many of the ways in which they are misinterpreted or the claim that the misinterpretation in question was undeserving of response, either normatively or positively.

            But let’s play a little seen/unseen here – I know you folks love your Bastiat. Is the value of answering a question before it is asked the same as the value of answering it after it was asked? Might it have been the case that Obama had no need to answer the question ex ante, but did have such a need ex post?

            So let’s shift the question: Was the question worth asking in the first place?

            As it stands, the answer to the question was the obvious answer, outlined by Brennan above. As suspected, we have just been witness to a tempest in a teapot, spun into existence by the right.

            The world would have been better if the fear mongers of the right had constrained themselves to attributing to Obama the position that he is simply a dirty statist who believes civil society relies upon the contributions of the state, rather than a filthy statist who believes that all actions are authored by the state.

          • http://www.facebook.com/fritz.hayek Fritz Hayek

            A “completely trivial gaffe” that is enshrined in an official White House document? “Misinterpretation”? Have you actually read the official transcript of the remarks made by Obama? (http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/07/13/remarks-president-campaign-event-roanoke-virginia) It is a paean to collectivism, replete with overstatements about the role of government and the necessity of government action. If you believe in collectivism, fine. Come right out and say it instead of trying to convince those of us who can read that Obama committed a “gaffe.”

          • good_in_theory

            I’m sorry, was Brennan’s gloss of Obama’s point *not* that he supports redistribution and state led collective action? Or is the lil libertarian going into another histrionic fit about collectivists? Just let it all out. Have a good cry about the statists and socialists and communists and marxists and relativists and multiculturalists and liberals and communitarians until you tucker yourself out.

  • purple_platypus

    From a non-American perspective, most of these responses are in something that superficially resembles English, but proves upon more careful examination to be some bizarre alien language, in which words like “horrific” apply to such things as a basic social safety net. It’s posts like this (not Brennan’s OP, but the majority of the replies) that make me, and others, question the sincerity of the “BH” in BHL, or whether the BHLs are really any better, or indeed any different, than the standard right-wing sort.

  • Michael

    http://www.thefreemanonline.org/headline/you-didnt-build-that/

    But it seems you are missing the point somewhere between the two articles. On the one hand, there should be a debate about how much people owe back to society (that point I liked) on the other hand Obama was perfectly clear about an uncontroversial point and people are being opportunistic.

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