An infinitely renewable source of ideologically-serviceable superlatives

It always amazes me that there are so many superlatives in this country for which, despite their presumed uniqueness or rarity, there seems to be an inexhaustible supply:

1. The Biggest Tax Increase in History
2. The Most Accurate Bombing Campaign Ever
3. The Most Liberal Democrat in the Senate
4. Top Al Qaeda Commander
5. The Most Important Election Ever

Call me cynical if you must, but I suspect there may be just a teeny bit of overexaggeration going on.

(Have some favorites of your own?  Share them with the class!)

UPDATE: Since I did a crappy job of getting my point across, let me splain: I'm talking here not just about superlatives, but superlatives which are re-applied time and time again to new examples as ideological utility dictates.  So every tax increase becomes the "biggest tax increase in history" in the mouths of Republicans, the military repeatedly kills a "top Al Qaeda commander," and so on.

Comments

[cemmcs]

The most surgically precise bombing campaign ever!

[steve]

Who can forget "the biggest threat to national security ever?"

[Donald Johnson]

We might be living through the greatest campaign of exaggeration in history.

There's also the claim that Bush is the worst President in history. I've got mixed feelings about that, because you can make a case for it, but it's not crystal clear. Nixon probably killed more innocent people for instance, and anyway, the "Bush is the worst President ever" meme is often part of that thought pattern where people think America had this wonderful human rights record until Bush came along. I've even seen liberals (young ignorant ones, I hope) say online that Bush is a disgrace to the sort of conservatism that Ronald Reagan represented.

[John Caruso]

I don't have an intimate enough knowledge of US presidential history to say if Bush is the worst or not, and it's ultimately subjective, though he certainly seems like he'd be a serious contender. That's a bit outside the arena I was describing here, though; I'm talking about superlatives that get re-applied, over and over, as ideology dictates. Like "the biggest tax increase in history": can they all be that? Can't there only be one "biggest tax increase in history"? You'd think so, yet Republicans don't seem to be able to say "tax increase" without the obligatory credulity-straining superlatives.

I did feel like I should have included more liberal serial superlatives, but I honestly couldn't think of as many. I think that may well be because there aren't as many, since liberals generally put more effort into their lying.

[Mike]

How can you overlook 'greatest nation on Earth?'

[Donald Johnson]

I see, though I think the last example (most important election) is more the kind of thing I hear from liberals, though maybe because I don't read conservative blogs very often.

[John Caruso]

Yeah, that was my main liberal example, though numbers 2 and 4 are pretty non-partisan.

[cemmcs]

So often in the discussion of anything related to politics, people are just repeating talking points they get from the group with which they identify. They're not even really having a discussion because the talking points are not illuminating or genuinely thought provoking. They're not supposed to be. Nobody is exchanging ideas or actually debating anything. Everybody is just repeating slogans -- simple, catchy, dramatic sounding words which don't say much -- like you hear in t.v. commercials(which also use a lot of superlatives). Repetition is inevitable. What is there really new to say about New Tide?

[John Caruso]

cemmcs: Definitely agreed. I sometimes go a few rounds with a Republican friend, but it's pretty pointless because she just spouts the current set of talking points, often verbatim—there's no thought involved at all. The challenge is getting beyond that.

[SteveB]

How about the perpetual liberal "shock" at the discovery that we don't live in a democracy?

Here's Dave Sirota, writing about the Wall Street bailout:

American democracy is defined by vesting government power in systems and rules, not in individuals and whims. We have been, as John Adams wrote, "an empire of laws, and not of men" -- until now.

Until now!?

Yes, it's the greatest attack on democracy in our nation's history! At least until the next the next attack on democracy comes along.

[Thomas Daulton]

How about "Assault on the Constitution" or "Attack on Constitutional Rights"... that old parchment has been treated pretty shabbily for well over a hundred years, I think...

I'm lacking a pithy catch-phrase, but how about "Pedophile congressman" or "closeted homosexual Family-Values politician" ... ??? Right up there with "unfaithful televangelist"...

What John's getting at is, these things happen over and over and over again and everyone keeps acting as if it's the first time. After this long history of so many incidents, I don't know why Congressmen aren't presumed to be gay pedophiles unless proven innocent, why televangelists aren't presumed to be unfaithful unless proven innocent...

[angryman@24:10]

But, but --

It is possible that these superlatives are deserved.

Over at ATR I found about The Crash Course, and the lecturer maintains that we are in an era of superlatives of kind -- or that we're living in a time where a great many hockey sticks are beating us soundly about the head and shoulders while we flair ineffectively. Lucky us.

Or something like that.

[John Caruso]

You've found the fly in my ointment: it's certainly possible that the repeated superlatives are all accurate. Maybe each of those tax cuts was the largest in history at the time, for instance. But I kind of doubt it. Sticking to that example, I'm guessing there'd be serious questions as to whether some of them were even tax increases at all—setting aside issues like whether they were adjusted to use comparable dollar amounts, whether they referred to percentages or to total revenues, whether they were still branded as a "largest tax increase in history" after a newer alleged tax increase allegedly took that title, etc, etc.