What the hell is going on in Washington? (Other than a gang of thugs breaking into Arnold Kling's house.) It's hard to know, exactly. Dig into the primary sources and you find congressional testimonies near impenetrable.
There's a phrase for this, actually: oracular obscurity. Permit literary critic Harold Bloom to describe:
"Oracular obscurity combines the spoken traditions of Homer and Shakespeare with the writing style of postwar French pomposité grandiloquente and just a dash of Latin American magic realism to produce an entirely new phenomenon that has reinvented congressional testimony as a literary genre."
Hat tip to Alan Greenspan for inspiring this phrase.
A public policy class that I am in actually explored “vagueness” as a technique in politics.
Inefficiency, costs, and worries about America’s future aside, one cannot help but admire the practice and refinement that must go into such vagueness.
I don’t think there’s very much Bloom doesn’t attribute to the spoken traditions of Homer and Shakespeare combined with the writing style of postwar French pomposité grandiloquente and just a dash of Latin American magic realism.
I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don’t know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Betty
http://laptopprocessor.info