In today's media, Vice President Dick Cheney is quoted as saying, ''a policy of retreat.'' His audience was an aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk, an aircraft carrier at Yokosuka Navy Base near Tokyo. I'm sure he received a very enthusiastic reception. --Let's not review the politics, just the rhetoric because this administration seems to have an issue keeping some essential points of rhetoric straight.
We'll establish the starting point for this as the administration's "war on terror." Media starlets ranging from Jon Stewart to Maureen Dowd have criticized the administration for mixing up the concepts of strategies and tactics. Terror is a tactic. War is a strategy. Nation building is a strategy. More democracy is a goal. Better health care is a goal. --This is not an easy rhetorical framework to manage. I've written many public relations plans and learned how to do this from a master of the art and craft. Most public relations plans are structured under sub-heads like "objectives," "strategies," "tactics" and "measurement."
But back to today's example: Cheney's rhetoric is that retreat is a policy. I believe that retreat is a tactic and would prefer to leave the tactics of how to win a war to the Pentagon and other military experts. 
If I were in a battle and the officer in charge said it was time to retreat, I would absolutely believe and trust him (or her). So, rhetorically speaking, Cheney believes these military tactics are actually elements of policy and does anyone really care?
Well, I do, obviously. I believe language is sacred, literally. In the political and business realms, language is not all but it plays an important and vital role. And when -- either by accident or design -- our rhetoric is sloppy, then we can't expect much in return. In Cheney's case, history will assay the results in the kiln of time. In the meantime, I will leave you, gentle reader, with a quote from the 1985 NYTimes obituary of Robert Fitzgerald, a professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard.who translated many of the classics of the Western Canon. I've carried this with me for more than twenty years now. It's something Fitzgerald wrote for the fiftieth anniversary report of the Harvard class of 1933:
So hard at best is the lot of man, and so great is the beauty he can apprehend, that only a religious conception of things can take in the extremes and meet the case. Our lifetimes have seen the opening of abysses before which the mind quails. But is seems to me there are a few things everyone can humbly try to hold onto: love and mercy (and humor) in everyday living; the quest for exact truth in language and affairs of the intellect; self-recollection or prayer; and the peace, the composed energy of art.
There are reasons for me to believe that the current administration either doesn't, or can't, appreciate Fitzgerald's framework.
