Ramage Makes Me Weepy

When I opened to the first page of Chapter 4, I was actually in emotional pain. Feeling weepy at the prospect of facing another thirty-some pages—albeit our last thirty-some pages—of Ramage, I armed myself with my blue pen (always blue) and set about underlining.

I felt that most of Bush’s arguments in his 2003 SOUA, especially regarding the war in Iraq, employed the Toulmin model of argument, a sort of working backward to justify a conclusion. A certain spot in Chapter 4 points this out rather well. Since, in my Ramage-weakened state, I’m not feeling particularly up to paraphrasing (which I am never very good at, anyway), I shall use direct quotes.

First, on page 126:...Blah, blah, blah...three elements...grounds, claim, warrant...

Then, on page 127, Bush uses the Toulmin model effectively: “Showing that the president may have started out with a conclusion (‘Let’s invade Iraq’) and worked his way back to the grounds justifying that conclusion (‘Iraq has WMD and links to terrorist organizations’) does not by itself constitute a fatal indictment…it’s a path many of us regularly follow from our beliefs to our understandings.

But, regardless of how he comes upon his argument (thank you, Ramage), the real questions remain to be answered: “How thoroughly were his original assumptions tested, how carefully were opposing arguments attended to, and to what extent were supportive conclusions coerced in the process of gathering evidence?”

And, on an unrelated note, I was pleased to find Swift’s “Modest Proposal” as an example of a “classic ‘consequentialist’ argument." I remember reading it in tenth grade; my heart said, “But eating babies is wrong!” but my brain said, “It’s just so logical!”