Essentially, my proposal…

For my project, I would like to examine the Bush administration’s use of rhetoric in regards to the “war on terror” particularly at the onset of the war. I would like to examine how this rhetoric was instrumental in gaining the support of the American people when the decision to go to war was first made. My working thesis is as follows: The Bush administration cleverly used rhetoric at a volatile time in the history of the United States as a tool to shape the opinion of the American people, thereby gaining support for a war that the public would likely have frowned upon had the circumstances and “delivery” of the administration’s agenda been different.

I realize that the above thesis sounds kind of biased, but I for the sake of making an argument I believe that a “biased” thesis is somewhat appropriate. I have found a few articles thus far that I am going to draw on in my research. The first is Leo Strauss and the Rhetoric of the War on Terror by Nicholas Xenos. The second an article from Presidential Studies Quarterly, Volume 37, Issue 4 entitled Bushspeak and the Politics of Lying: Presidential Rhetoric in the “War on Terror.” I have also found The Rhetoric of Bush’s War on Evil from K.B. Journal (kbjournal.org) to be of interest. However, I am still in the process of finding additional resources.

In completing this project I would like to examine the rhetoric used in President George W. Bush’s speech when we first decided to declare war in Iraq, the rhetoric used in his address he made when it was apparent that no weapons of mass destruction had been found, and the rhetoric used to defend changes to laws made in the interests of keeping our “homeland” safe as the war on terror progressed (such as the patriot act).

I chose this topic because my area of study is journalism, and I plan to use my written communications degree in some regard in journalism. Since a large part of journalism is dealing with stories about politics and current United States events, I think that this project may turn into an “article” of sense that could qualify as a piece of journalism – and hopefully the kind of article that we could have read for this class.

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