TUESDAY: What sacred Melville did for whales...

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 30, 2025

...we'll do for the president's groaners: Our recent reference to sacred Melville pleased a certain Tonight show comedian of the Leno era. With that fact in mind:

In this morning's report, we started to create a taxonomy of ridiculous public misstatements by the sitting president. As the leading authority on the topic reminds us, sacred Melville also labored in this general field:

Cetology of Moby-Dick

The cetology in Herman Melville's 1851 novel, Moby-Dick, is a running theme that appears most importantly in Ishmael's zoological classification of whales in Chapter 32, "Cetology." The purpose of that chapter, the narrator says, is "to attend to a matter almost indispensable to a thorough appreciative understanding of the more special leviathanic revelations and allusions of all sorts which are to follow." Further descriptions of whales and their anatomy occur in seventeen other chapters, including "The Sperm Whale's Head—Contrasted View" (Chapter 74) and "The Right Whale's Head—Contrasted View" (Chapter 75).

Although writing a work of fiction, Melville included extensive material that presents the properties of whales in a seemingly scientific form. Many of the observations are taken from Melville's reading in whaling sources in addition to his own experiences in whaling in the 1840s. They include descriptions of a range of species in the infraorder of Cetacea. The detailed descriptions are a digression from the storyline, but critics argue that their objectivity and encyclopedic form balance the spiritual elements of the novel and ground its cosmic speculations. Although Melville "keenly parodies nonsense statistics, rigid hierarchies, and the arbitrarily definitive taxonomies characteristic of antebellum natural science," Melville also "showed the elasticity of cataloguing: how it could be used as a literary device, stylistic trait, and even function as an argument . . . the list is offered as vehicle of thought and argumentation, and for its ability to plainly display information in a systematic and exhaustive manner."

And so on from there. But let the word go forth to the nations:

If Melville "keenly parodied nonsense statistics, rigid hierarchies, and the arbitrarily definitive taxonomies characteristic of [his era's] natural science," he might have found himself hot to trot with respect to the dying national discourse of the present day.

He offered taxonomies of the whale. This morning, we started to compile a taxonomy of the leviathanic public misstatements made by the sitting president. 

We called attention to three such monsters from the shallows and the sandbars. Let us start to count the ways:

Varieties of clownish misstatement by the sitting president:

Statements or claims which are "glaringly false"
In this morning's report, we quoted an obvious example of this type of howler. The statement in question was quoted by the New York Times, then dismissed as "glaringly false."

Go ahead! Go back and check it out.

Statements or claims which are unsupported by any attempt at evidence
In groaners of this familiar type, the sitting president makes a poisonous claim which could be true, at least in theory, while offering no evidence in support of his poisonous statement. We offered an ongoing example is this morning's report. 

Many of the sitting president's most frequently recited groaners are memorized, shopworn claims of this maddening type.

Statements or claims which are so imprecise that it's unclear what's being alleged
"The Russia, Russia, Russia hoax was a terrible made-up fictional thing," the sitting president recently said. But then, when has he ever gargled or even brushed his teeth without emitting this shopworn cri de coeur.

This is a favorite memorized chestnut among all those who perform on Fox News Channel programs. But what exactly is being denounced as "a hoax?" 

The president, and the performers on Fox, never quite remember to say. It sounds like they are making a claim, but the claim is really a pseudo-claim. No one knows what the president means, most likely including him.

Our taxonomy of groaning misstatements will start with those varieties. Misstatements aren't all made alike, although they're all equally harmful.

We leave you today with a question:

Fourteen years into this mess, why haven't you seen any professors or journalists creating a taxonomy of the various ways this man misleads the public? 

On this campus, we've suggested a possible reason for the president's endless misstatements. We ask this about those other parties:

What's supposed to be wrong with them?