by Thomas Cathcart, Daniel Klein
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Product Description
Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein, authors of the national bestseller Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar, aren’t falling for any election year claptrap—and they don’t want their readers to either! In Aristotle and an Aardvark Go to Washington, our two favorite philosopher-comedians return just in time to save us from the double-speak, flim-flam, and alternate reality of politics in America.
Deploying jokes and cartoon as well as the occasional insight from Aristotle and his peers, Cathcart and Klein explain what politicos are up to when they state: “The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.” (Donald Rumsfeld), “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” (Bill Clinton), or even, “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” (Thomas Jefferson, et al).
Drawing from the pronouncements of everyone from Caesar to Condoleeza Rice, Genghis Kahn to Hillary Clinton, and Adolf Hitler to Al Sharpton. Cathcart and Klein help us learn to identify tricks such as “The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy” (non causa pro causa) and the “The Fallacy Fallacy” (argumentum and logicam). Aristotle and an Aardvark is for anyone who ever felt like the politicos and pundits were speaking Greek. At least Cathcart and Klein provide the Latin name for it (raudatio publica)!
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Average Customer Review:
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 A Funny Book, 2008-12-03
This is a very funny book. Cathcart and Klein are more insightful than any of the broadcast journalists. They seem to understand Washington and use their understanding as a basis of humor.
I enjoyed this book almost as much as their other, similar, book:
Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar . . .: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes
I enjoyed this book and wholeheartedly recommend it to others.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
 `Understanding Political Doublespeak Through Philosophy and Jokes', 2008-10-18
The examples may be quoted from and especially relevant to Washington but the process of political doublespeak is universal. I mention that to try to reassure the Americans who may feel that their politicians (of whatever stripe) have been singled out unfairly. My own copy of this book is liberally festooned with Post-it notes, many of which cause me current amusement and may well form part of my future research for post-employment writing.
`It's a good speech - just a couple of points need obfuscation.'
The book (hardbound, as all good reference material should be) has six parts. Those parts are entitled:
Part I The Tricky Talk Strategy (Misleading with Doublespeak)
Part II The `So's Your Mother' Strategy (Misleading by Getting Personal)
Part III The Fancy Footwork Strategy (Misleading with Informal Fallacies)
Part IV The Star Trek Strategy (Misleading by Creating an Alternate Universe)
Part V Extra Credit (Misleading with Way Twisty Formal Fallacies)
Part VI The Debates (Misleading by Fabrication (Ours))
All of this is very important if you wish to understand what is fallacious and why. But if you are just in the mood for humour, and need to be comforted in these unsettling times consider: that failure may simply be a success that hasn't happened yet! This reminds me of another line (not in the book), which I will borrow from another famous philosopher (the late Jim Morrison) and quote accurately albeit out of context `No-one here gets out alive'. Is this a lie, or a larger truth?
Yes, it is true: `There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you' (Will Rogers)
Now I have a dilemma: where do I store this book? Under `H' for humour, or under `R' for reality? Alas, `F' for fallacy (examples) is already overflowing.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
 Poor Follow Up Effort, 2008-09-30
After a throughly enjoyable "Plato and a Platypus", I was expecting more of the same crisp, original offerings. Unfortunately, this one is tilted so far to left that it becomes exactly what it is trying to elaborate on...Political Doublespeak. For example, under the lists of "...unspeakably sneaky Unspeak" their favorite is "preventing voter fraud" for "disenfranchising poor and minority potential voters." So, if you have have a problem with dead people voting,and any of the other documented examples of outright voter fraud; then your real goal is to "disenfranchise" the poor and minorities?? The first sentence in the Introduction is "That sounds like utter bulls**t!" So does a lot of what follows!
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Overdue assesment of political doublespeak, 2008-09-04
From Jerome Stephens, retired reference librarian, Warren, Ohio
It is interesting to note the trends of thought in the reviews. So they concentrate on the Bush administration. That administration is the one that has been in the news for the last 8 years. If the book had been published in 2000, the Clinton administration would have supplied an equal amount of equally good material for the book.
Fallacies are fallacies, and can be hard to understand and trace. The authors have done quite well with an inherently slippery subject.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Nice idea, but..., 2008-08-21
I watched the authors on C-SPAN during their book tour and was intrigued.
I just bought the book, and I am... disappointed.
Oh, the jokes are amusing enough, and the explanation of logical fallacies is dead simple to understand, and the examples given are spot on- let's make no dispute on that. A quick reading of this book will educate the thoughtful mind on exactly how and where our leaders are trying to fool us.
The problem is that, well, it's a quick read. It's too quick. It is, to be frank, shallow- a quick dip on each topic, then rushing on to the next, without fully developing or explaining any one item, much less all of them. This is a book to which the word "profound" need not apply; there are no openings available.
The book also suffers from leaning too heavily on the Bush administration for examples. True, George W. Bush and his cronies have raised lying to the voters to new heights, but there needs to be political balance in an educational work such as this; otherwise a large portion of the readership will tune it out as being partisan. I say again, Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, Gonzales, Rice, and the rest of the Bush White House employ logical fallacies and outright deception like Olympic champions- but that's no excuse for failing to give more than token gestures to demonstrating Democrats' equally offensive use of the tactics.
One final quibble: if you can use the eight letter word for bovine excreta without censorship, you can use its four letter root word without censorship. If you can't say the word without blanking out letters in the w--d, you shouldn't use the word at all. Please don't treat your readers like little kids, especially since little kids know quite well what "the F word" is- even if they might not know what it means.
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