I've been able to secure an advance copy of a future Star Tribune editorial about the hanging of Saddam Hussein. Read it today so you can tell your colleagues at the next faculty meeting or peace poetry/drum circle workshop that you read and appreciated its wisdom first!
Like any good middle school student using the Funk & Wagnall's Encyclopedia as a crutch, the Star Tribune likes to rearrange a few words and paraphrase things to keep people guessing. Before you go spouting off about your prescience, how can you be sure the next Star Tribune editorial wistfully recalling the dignity of Saddam Hussein is based on this particular source? Look for these irrisistible Hertzbergian rhetorical flourishes:
1. Glib, leaden alliteration:
The deposed dictator's dangling the President said, "is an important milestone on Iraq's course to becoming a democracy"
A phrase like "turned-out tyrant's take down" in the Star Tribune version will be a huge red flag.
2. Moral equivalency arguments:
but the Bush Administration's disdain for such institutions was nearly a match for Saddam's own.
Which could easily be substituted for Bush is worse than Hitler, Pol Pot, or at the most extreme, United Healthcare CEO William McGuire.
3. Taunts that the war critics were right all along and resignation to defeat:
Compared to many of the other horrors that have served as milestones along the four-year journey from shock and awe through stay the course to surge and pray, what happened at 6:10 A.M. on December 30th in that dank, foul-smelling execution chamber was relatively free of bloodshed.
It did not take long for the hanging to become a metaphor for the over-all disaster of which it is part.
Which could be summarized by the Star Tribune as "we were right all along, surrender now!"
Of course, no matter the topic, all Star Tribune editorials include variations on these themes. But with just a little study and pattern recognition ability, you too can say on the date this one is published - that story is so last week.
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