TOW 2: America's Billionaire by Maureen Dowd

Maureen Dowd, a long time writer of almost 40 years for publishings such as Time Magazine and The New York Times, comes out swinging at Republican lawmakers.  In her piece she comments on two news events.  These two are Warren Buffet speaking at Georgetown and the reforms of Food Stamp funding.  She starts out immediately insulting the "House Republican gargoyles," making it quite obvious that this article is for a far left reader.  This article starts out by talking of how there the House is trying to cut spending on things that are as important in her eyes such as Obamacare and Food Stamps.  She goes on further to say that they "don't understand math or history."  After this harsh criticism she moves to try and gain support for Buffets speaking of his contributions with help of Bill Gates and many other extremely wealthy people.  My consensus with this is that she shoots herself int the foot in her effort to appeal to ethos.  Her idea is that she can piggy back on the great authority that a figure like Warren Buffet carries by simply connecting two somewhat similar pieces, but she does a terrible job of this.  In my opinion, Dowd stretches things way to far trying to connect two things that have almost nothing in common.  Her effort to appeal to ethos thus leaves her looking like less of an intelligent source than when she started.  This appeal may have a slightly different feel on me than her normal audience however.  Her normal audience, likely being a farther left group that is also have strong opinions about the topic, are probably more easily stirred than I.  They most likely already agree with her from the moment she insulted Republicans, and the rest is likely icing on the cake.  This is the reasoning for her appeal to pathos.  To compliment her appeal to ethos Dowd uses pathos to charge up her already opinionated audience.  These two methods work together flawlessly and in the presence of the audience she is targeting, would likely work to perfections.