"Americans aren't stupid"...unless they believe drilling for oil will help us

Consider this statement:

Now, some politicians always see this as a political opportunity. And since it’s an election year, they’re already dusting off their three-point plans for $2 gas. I’ll save you the suspense: Step one is drill, step two is drill, and step three is keep drilling. We hear the same thing every year. Well the American people aren’t stupid.

The speaker was Obozo, the mystery man who managed to get a Social Security number from a state he never visited before he got it.

Surely you heard Barky make the statement quoted above, right? Because it's so astonishingly stupid you'd think it would have made the nightly news on all of the alphabet networks.

Didn't hear it? Yeah, me neither. Wonder why not?

In case you're skeptical, here's the video:

I wanna take Barky's statement apart line by line, to show you how the trick works. Keep in mind that his objective here--a step toward winning a second term--is to defend against rising gasoline prices. This requires that he defend his order pulling drilling permits in the Gulf and refusing to issue others.

This would seem an impossible task, but he sets it up by saying "Some politicians always see this [rising gas prices] as a political opportunity. And since it’s an election year, they’re already dusting off their three-point plans for $2 gas."

This statement makes it appear that any criticism of his policies is simply folks trying to score political gains. Since everyone knows this is common in politics, it gets lots of people nodding in agreement with whatever follows.

Second sentence is a debating tactic called "reductio ad absurdem," where you make the other guy's position seem ridiculous, by reducing it to an absurd extreme. It's like saying "Democrats claim that simply by keeping your tires aired up you can get 100 miles per gallon." Since people intuitively know that's not plausible, it makes the claimant seem like a charlatan.

Finally, Obozo's characterization of the alleged Republican "three-point plan" as the same step repeated 3 times implies that the very idea of trying to reduce oil and gas prices by actually drilling for oil is an absurd notion--one which only simpletons not sophisticated enough to grasp the subtleties of international energy markets could possibly believe.

Note well these tactics, since you'll be seeing them a gazillion times between now and the election. They're what substitutes for reasoned debate when the speaker can't defend a policy on rational grounds.

They're the equivalent of the old legal saying, "If the facts help your case, pound the facts; if the facts don't help your case, pound the law; and if neither facts nor law support your case, pound the table."