ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF THE LEFT'S "IS/AS CONFLATION"

Powerline - and others, notably DISSECTING LEFT and this blog - have noted that the Left seems to continually use analogies and metaphors instead of deductive reasoning and rational arguments. I have described this as the "IS/AS Conflation" because it is typically most obvious when someone treats an analogical comparison ("that man sings like a bird") as if it had an ontological verity (that man who sings like a bird is a bird. OR: "The USSR had secretive prisons known as gulags; Gitmo is LIKE a secretive prison; therefore Gitmo IS a gulag." FOR ANOTHER EXAMPLE CLICK HERE.).

A.N. Whitehead called this logical error "The Fallacy of the Misplaced Concreteness."

Part of the Left's predilection for mistaking the "poetic" for the "real" is the result of the fact that Leftists are leading practitioners of (victims of?) post-modernism - which is not only anti-West and anti-bourgoise, but anti-reason.

TODAY - (literally and figuratively!) - gives us another salient example of this common error. Here is the item - hat-tip THE AMERICAN THINKER -

NBC's Katie Couric treated UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who is mired in a scandal Couric only lightly touched, as a wise sage, empathetically ending her taped interview with him, which aired on Tuesday's Today: "You literally have the weight of the world on your shoulders." He agreed: "I do, but not everybody understands that." [UMPH added!]

Of course, Couric was TOTALLY WRONG to describe Annan as LITERALLY having the weight of the world on his shoulders; she would have been correct to say that he FIGURATIVELY had the weight of the world on his shoulders. (Annan literally had ONLY the weight of his shirt and suit-jacket on his shoulders.)

As WARREN BELL wrote over at NRO:

KATIE COURIC IS LITERALLY DUMB AS A POST [Warren Bell]

Did she really say "literally have the weight the world on your shoulders"? Because if that were true, Kofi Annan would literally be crushed instantaneously into a pancake of infinite thinness. We're sticklers on a few points of usage in the Bell household, and the constant misuse of "literally" is public enemy number one. That a journalist of Ms. Couric's stature (smirk!) would say "literally" when she means its exact opposite -- "figuratively" -- makes my blood boil.But not literally, because then my boiling blood would come shooting out of my eyes and ears and get on the dog, with whom I arose at 5 AM today.

I am contending that by mispeaking - and doing it so badly - Couric exposes more than her grammatical mediocrity; she exposes her inner Leftist. She mispoke because the distinction between literal truth and figurative approximation is one that her Leftist-biased mind can no longer distinguish.

I have long argued that people who have a psychological diathesis for conflating "is" with "as" are more prone to being suckered by post-modernist mumbo-jumbo and swept up by Leftist ideology - and it best explains why Leftism persists even though it has utterly failed everywhere and everytime it has ever been tried. It persists because people who are illogical find it satisfying. Which - if it's true - points us toward the ultimate cure for Leftism: mandatory LOGIC CLASSES in every high school.

UPDATE: WELCOME BETSY'S PAGE READERS! Please check out a few other posts while your here.