Socrates says rhetoric is scary, and I find it scary that he uses rhetoric to prove it

The paragraph that really gets mei n this article is “That John. S. McCain III opposed making Martin Luther King’s birthday a holiday in Arizone, or that he thinks clear-cut logging is good for America, or that he feels our present gun laws are not clinically insane, this stuff counts for nothing with those Town Hall crowds, all on their feet, cheering their own ability to finally really “cheer.”

Now here is the quest I ask after reading this. Are young voters votes worth the effort the politicians put into getting the vote? Of course, it is worth it for the politician, but what about for the citizens of America? DFW talks up McCain in the section “Who Even Cares Who Cares,” but as soon as he types the above quoted passage, all the build-up melts for me. If these voters are cheering for rhetoric, and not for the values, then why would it be helpful for them to vote.

I took a Philosophy class last semester, and this thought took me back to that class. Socrates believed and preached that rhetoric decieves so many people, especially from poltical leaders.

Another thing I would like to address in this blog is the connection I made between John McCain’s torture experience with the part in Trip to Hanoi that talks about how the North Vietnamese really cared about the American Pilots.

“The North Vietnamese genuinelly care about the welfare of the hundreds of captures American pilots and give them bigger rations than the Vietnamese population gets…” This is the quote from Trip to Hanoi. Now compare this with the quote over torture in Up, Simba.

“…where for a week they made him beg for a doctor and finally set a couple of the fractures without anesthetic and let two other fractures and the groin would go untreated.” Which quote do I believe? This, along with confusions over the LBJ museum and Fog of War is making me slowly lose faith in rhetoric. The thing is, I can never esc ape it which scares me now more than ever.