The same year, when the Serbs were imposing “ethnic cleansing” on the Muslims in Bosnia and the world was wringing its hands, op-ed columnists urged the supply of arms and NATO air support to the besieged Bosnians in their homeland. Gen. Colin Powell told The New Yorker: “William Safire and Tony Lewis say this will only take a little bit of bombing and it will work . . . and Safire . . . just says, ‘Air power can do it.’ Forget it.” Rather than whine about his misrepresentation of my position, I counterattacked: “That’s the straw-man trick: Take your opponent’s argument to a ridiculous extreme and then attack the extreme.” (U.S. air power helped force the Serbs out and also led to today’s independent Kosovo.)

Now for my own perp walk: Such mid-1990s straw-manese reminded me of a speech I drafted for President Nixon to give at the Air Force Academy in 1969. Handing over my draft, I carefully advised the president in these words: “Take the easy way.” He looked surprised but understood when he read the line “It would be easy for a president of the United States to buy some popularity by going along with the new isolationists.” For years afterward, Nixon could then truthfully use the “some say” straw man: “Some of my advisers say I should ‘take the easy way’ — but I have rejected that course. . . .”

THE REAL STRAW MAN

We know the technique; but what’s the source of straw man? A poet in the 18th century responded to critical judgment with “Critics, who like the scarecrows stand/upon the poet’s common land.” The best guess about the trope’s origin is the farmer’s scarecrow — an old coat and hat set up on a pole and stuffed with straw to resemble a human sentry and frighten hungry blackbirds away from vegetable seedlings.

Though it appeared in a somewhat sexist 17th-century English saying — “A man of straw is worth a woman of gold” — in U.S. politics it was made famous in 1912 by President William Howard Taft, who had been set in place by the retiring Theodore Roosevelt four years earlier but who was being savaged by Teddy’s campaign to get his old job back: “I was a man of straw; but I have been a man of straw long enough. Every man who has blood in his body, and who has been misrepresented as I have . . . is forced to fight.” Taft won renomination, but Roosevelt ran as a “Bull Moose” independent, splitting Republicans and helping elect Woodrow Wilson, the Democrat.

Early in the 2008 primary season, The New York Post — not inclined to support most Democrats — surprised readers with the front-page headline “Post Endorses Obama.” David Carr, media reporter for The Times, asked rhetorically, “Why did The Post kick Senator Clinton to the curb?” While noting that the relationship between Rupert Murdoch of The Post and the Clintons was complicated, he wrote that the endorsement “invited suggestions that Mr. Murdoch was using The New York Post to set up a straw man for the Republicans to mow down in the fall.”