Ethos

Ethos: using your street cred to persuade people…more or less.

In the portion of the hearings we've been looking at, both sides use ethos to persuade. First, Secretary of the Army Stevens makes his comment that he is speaking on behalf of the one-and-a-half million loyal members of the Army—thus establishing his cred as a guy who knows his stuff and is working for a righteous cause.

McCarthy challenges that immediately, and counters with his own ethos appeal that he is the nation's guardian against Communism.

It's a holier-than-thou, ethos-to-the-brim exchange.

Pathos

Joe McCarthy was the king of pathos. Not in a nice way, either.

He wasn't telling click-baity stories about the time a golden retriever puppy saved a bucket of sloths from a duckling flood. He was directly tapping into the fears of people at the time, effortlessly playing on their in-group and out-group dynamics. Any sort of association with even vaguely left-wing groups was more than enough to become a target, and the only way out would be to rat out your friends and associates for the same kind of treatment.

This is what made Welch's smackdown so deliciously epic.

Welch initially used pathos of another sort in his needling of Cohn on the stand. Welch was employing ridicule, which is often the best way to deal with power-mad folks. People look a lot smaller when you've mocked them. Show the argument to be ridiculous, then you show the person making it to be the same. Then you're done.

When McCarthy lashed out at Fred Fisher, who, remember, wasn't even in the room, that was a step too far. Welch's response is pitch perfect, calling the senator out on exactly what he did. His disgust at McCarthy, and dismay at the damage being caused to Fisher, is palpable. Some viewers commented that it looked like Welch was about to burst into tears thinking of McCarthy trying to ruin the rep of the young Fisher.

It was the perfect response. This was a case of fighting fire with fire, pathos with pathos. Welch held a mirror up to McCarthy, and by extension, everyone who supported him. No one liked what they saw.

Except McCarthy himself, but then, he barely looked.

Logos

Not much to say here, since logic was missing in action during much of this debate.