Ad Hominum Quotes

This quotation illustrates a peculiar situation with regard to President Barack Obama. Among some subgroups of the United States, there are people who hate President Obama. And some of them, throughout his Presidency, has described Obama in these obviously false phrases. They manage to hold these false belief’s despite the fact that the refuting evidence is very easy to find. Obama was a very devout Protestant. And his political world view was not communism or Marxism, but middle of the road. He was not even in the left wing of his Democratic Party. However what De Varona and others with these seemingly absurd views discount the data because it is part of a communist conspiracy to plant false information so they can put their man in the White House.

Wilson was one of the first to realize that there was a group of neoconservatives who were lobbying for an invasion of Iraq and had access at the highest levels of the Bush Administration.

In some universities would sometimes protest the selection of a commencement speaker and demonstrate. On some of these occasions the school administration withdrew the invitation. In addition to the problem described by Beckel, the university sells out its basic intellectual commitment to hear all ideas and points of view—regardless of how repugnant or evil. Commencement speakers tend to create a bigger problem because of the custom of the university granting the speaker an Honorary Degree. Whereas it is against the academic tradition to censor a speaker and having a speaker does NOT associate the University, the faculty or the students with the views of the speaker. But the granting of the Honorary Degree does imply an institutional approval and admiration of the speaker, and that is fair game for student protest. However in the beginning of the 21st century some extreme left wing students succeeded in intimidating spineless university administrators and trustees into censoring speech and the ideas of the speaker. This was typical behavior of the right wing brownshirts of the 1930s when it was the Fascists who were prohibiting certain speakers—usually left wingers. 80 years later it was the left wing extremists engaging in this undemocratic behavior.

His description of the extreme partisanship in England at the time could just as easily describe the American political polarization of 2012—85 years later.

Ad hominum attacks are attacks against the person—not his views or arguments against them and not even what he has allegedly done or the consequences of what he has done to others. It is direct character assassination. This is much more effective than trying to argue what wrong has been done. It has been a very common tactic of the Right Wing Republicans and the Tea Party against liberals and supporters if desegregation, and has also been used by extreme leftists in attacking powerful industrialists. When Assange published thousands of State Department cables, many of which exposed the fact that Government officials had been lying to the public and Congress while under oath, there was a massive ad hominum attack on Assange casting aspersions on any information he might claim is real, but never once denying that any of the cables were genuine. The attacks claimed that Assange’s publication would cause American agents throughout the world to be exposed and killed, but even a year after these accusations, neither the State Department nor the intelligence agencies could point to a single case where an American agent had come to harm. The embarrassment was however profound, and some governments were outraged that their confidential dealings with the United State had been exposed to public scrutiny.

Writing about President George Washington:. Bache, a grandson of Benjamin Franklin, was jailed under the Sedition Act for his writings against the government.

The kind of viscous, personal attacks on politicians that was so prevalent in America was also used in France where many politicians and their constituents were shocked.

1968 was one of the more polarized presidential elections, and most politicians in the heat of debate, tended to make ad hominem attacks on their opponents instead of rational arguments. Conservatives tended to attack opponents as communists, communist sympathizers, or giving aid and comfort to the communists. Often they never got around to attacking the real political position of their opponents. Buckley realized that he would not persuade many of his fellow conservatives to eschew the personal red-baiting on their opponents. Their political; base demanded this. But he urged them to restrain themselves and first make a rational attack on liberalism and liberal policies. Very few took his advice that year or ever in the remainder of the century until the fall of the Soviet Union.

Most American politicians and citizens, unlike DeLay, believe that arguing against the opponents’ political philosophy should be done with debate, civil argument, advocacy, speechmaking and writing and not by attacking opponents and confronting them whenever possible. Later, DeLay was convicted and sentenced to jail for money laundering and illegally spending and raising campaign funds. He was also reprimanded by the House Ethics Committee for unethical methods of fund raising for other earlier actions.

Partisanship had reached a heated pitch like America at the beginning of the 21st century. Note that she used the term “violence” to describe verbal assaults. Joseph Hume was the leader of the Radical Party.