No, I didn't know what Hanson meant, based on the shared assumptions of his audience...which is, if I'm not mistaken, Conservatives, right?

You didn't actually mean to say that Conservatives have the IQ of a squirrel, did you? Nah, of course not. Just an infelicitous choice of words, Right?

VD's writing to an audience of Conservatives, and he's preaching to the choir in the language of Conservatives. If outsiders don't get it, it has nothing to do with IQ. You perceive his position as insightful and reasoned because it reinforces your own beliefs. As a skeptical infidel, I see it quite clearly as highly-slanted propaganda.

I think I'd be insulting your intelligence to go through those three paragraphs again and point out the bias. Hanson's a fairly skilled propagandist, and that was rather clumsy by his standards. Even a rabid partisan should be able to perceive the ham-handed spin.

A better example of VDH's rhetorical scalpel is a phrase I didn't spot until I'd read it half a dozen times: "the first World Trade Center bombing". That was slick, and I trust you can see it now that it's pointed out: There was only one bombing of the WTC, in 1993 (car bomb in the underground garage, six killed, 1,042 injured). In 2001 airplanes were flown into the WTC, killing over 3,000 people. But in that casual phrase conflating the two events, Hanson places on Bill Clinton's watch a disaster of the same magnitude as 9/11.

I have to hand it to VDH, he's good at this stuff.

But that doesn't make him right. Just clever.