A red herring is something that diverts attention from the basic issue at hand. This response spirals the conversation down a different path because you are responding to their criticism of you, rather than the issue at hand. How often has someone said something to you that they know will bother you and send you down a diverted path? For example, have you confronted someone who has turned something in late? They may respond with an excuse.
How many times has someone said something to you that made no sense? Obama’s words refer to actions taken more than 900 years ago, and therefore might have been part of a strategy to somehow take our minds off the very real danger of Islamic terrorism and downplay a very real threat to Western civilization, or so many Americans believe.Have you ever asked someone something and heard their answer, only to walk away and think, “I don’t think they ever answered my question.” Given the recent burning alive of a Jordanian pilot and the successive beheadings the world has been forced to witness and endure at the hands of Islamic terrorists, and the unending stream of threats and atrocities committed by the same, the presidential words ring as “red herrings,” which are intentional or unintentional logical fallacies that seek to draw attention away from the true matter at hand to something that is basically irrelevant. The article argued that Obama was trying to stop Americans from thinking about actual dangers and, instead, focus on the distant past: abroad.”Ī few decades later, an article in US News and World Report complained that Barack Obama was talking about the Crusades as a way to distract public attention from ongoing acts of Islamic terrorism. America’s credibility has plummeted over the past two years because this Administration lacks a coherent national strategy to deal with the many problems facing the U.S. participation in the United Nations, but from the drift and weakness of Clinton’s foreign and defense policies. The real danger of America’s withdrawal from the world comes not from congressional cutbacks in foreign aid or restrictions on U.S. “The Clinton Administration’s rhetoric about the “isolationist proposals” from Congress is a red herring. Back in 1995, the Heritage Foundation published an article lambasting Bill Clinton for his “red herring” rhetoric about Congressional isolationism: Calling out a “red herring” allows pundits to dismiss an issue as unimportant, and also gives them the chance to recast the current political situation according to their own views.
In our own times, red herring is typically an accusation that politicians and journalists like to throw at whichever party they are against. He then described, at length, they way that the public had been thrown off the scent of the real news about the Napoleonic wars.
Corbett described the way boys used a red herring to draw hunters away from a hare they wanted to keep for himself. (The herring here is red because it has been smoked, which gives it an overwhelming and distinctive odor.)Īn English journalist named William Corbett, writing in 1807, may have been the first person to explicitly connect the old hunting practice to the figurative use of the red herring. The term, according to Merriam Webster, comes from the old custom of dragging a red herring across a trail so that its strong smell would confuse hunting dogs. In some cases, political operatives may deliberately plant red herrings to turn the public away from an embarrassing issue.Īt other times, the red herrings simply appear on their own. A “red herring” is an argument or piece of information that distracts from a different and more important issue.
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