Troubling

Troubling. It seems I keep reading about politicians calling this or that “troubling”. I first wondered if I was imagining things, so I did a little research:

Google the web for “troubling” and you’ll get 27 million hits; google “trouble” and you get 340 million. So troubling isn’t exactly an unusual word, but it’s far from the most common.

Google News, on the other hand, has 8,820 hits for “troubling” at the moment I tried it. I perused the first 100 hits, and the majority of them are in stories related to politics. Not all of them, to be sure, but the clear majority. Ah, ha!

My final experiment was to do four searches on Google News: “troubling hillary-clinton", “troubling harry-reid", “troubling president-bush", and “troubling bill-frist”. The hits, respectively, were 38, 22, 976, and 16. But there’s another pattern, slightly subtler, that’s more interesting: the hits on the two Republicans were almost all about the Republicans, and the hits on the two Democrats were almost all said by the Democrats.

This is very one-sided. Apparently Republicans are very troubling to Democrats.

Then I wondered if I really understood what the word “troubling” meant, so I looked it up:

troubling

adj : causing distress or worry or anxiety

Well, that’s about what I thought it meant.

So why are the Democrats so one-sidedly “troubled” by the Republicans? Not that I’m really troubled by this, I’m just kind of curious about why that word seems to keep popping up.

I googled all sorts of things, trying to find someone who knew the reason; didn’t find a darned thing. So I took the more difficult approach: I sat down and pondered. And here’s what I came up with:

I think this is a conscious effort on the part of the Democrats — a word wouldn’t be so lop-sidedly used, otherwise. The Republicans are, I’m sure, just as troubled by the Democrats as vice versa. Yet they aren’t saying so. That difference can really only be accounted for by a deliberate effort.

If the Democrats are doing it on purpose, why are they? I’ll bet they got some advice from someone they trust, a political strategist most likely. I’ll further bet that they got advice that the word “troubling” is a splendid way to make your political enemy look bad — it’s completely non-specific and can’t really be countered. Think about it: Harry Reid calls the NSA wiretaps “troubling”. What’s President Bush going to say? “No, Harry, they’re not troubling"? Doesn’t work. But anybody listening to Harry Reid hears a respected [did I really say that?] Senator calling President Bush’s actions “troubling”. Sounds bad, doesn’t it?

I think that’s the explanation. When faced with a situation where they have no reasoned, defensible counter-position (something that seems to happen to them with great regularity), the Democrats have deliberately decided to invoke the generic, all-purpose adjective “troubling” to register their non-specific objection, and to convey their concern with the proper gravitas.

I’d like to see the Republicans counter this troubling trend. Everytime a Democrat uses “troubling” to characterize a Republican policy or action, I’d like to see the Republicans challenge the Democrats to articulate and defend their alternative. I don’t hear that enough; instead, the Democrat’s non-specific whining is usually allowed to stand unchallenged, like the mom who ignores her screaming child.

Sometimes the child really does need a good spanking.