Conflation inflation

Conflation inflation
By Thomas Oliphant, Globe Columnist  |  January 9, 2005
WASHINGTON
LET THE great conflation debate begin....
...In one presentation that I found useful, historian Arthur Schlesinger wrote of someone else's writing that its conflation was able to "fuse the clutter of detail into a narrative." The definitions, in other words, do not carry a clear, pejorative connotation. Current political usage, however, clearly does. At its core, it involves the nefarious blending of disparate elements to bolster a very weak argument.
For example, Charles Pena, who runs defense policy studies at the libertarian conservative Cato Institute, which opposes Bush on Iraq, noted a Bush habit of equating 9/11 with Pearl Harbor and the war on terrorism with World War II. Pena wrote that "even implying that Iraq is like the Second World War ignores history and shows that the president continues to confuse and conflate Iraq with Al Qaeda." In another example, Barry Schwartz, a Swarthmore College professor, in a tough op-ed piece last week in The New York Times on Bush's Social Security thinking, pointed out an often-overlooked difference between the question of whether equity investments in general are a good retirement security idea (they appear to be) and whether equity investments made via individual decisions for individual accounts are equally good (there's no evidence they are, and much that they aren't). Of the president's allies, Schwartz wrote: "The Bush administration is deliberately conflating them."In politics of late, the use of conflation is clearly meant to imply the irresponsible linking of disparate subjects. Moreover, the charge of conflation appears to contain another element where Bush administration advocacy is concerned -- the linking, or conflating of a stronger image with a weaker one in order to buttress the standing of the former. Thus, we see the conflating of war in Iraq with war on Al Qaeda (which is also designed to further the ridiculous notion that Saddam Hussein was somehow involved with 9/11), and of war in Iraq with war on terrorism. Thus we also see the conflating of equity investments in general with equity investment made by private accounts carved out of Social Security revenues....