I read www.washingtonmonthly.com daily, and you should, too. Yesterday, there was an entry entitled, The Birthers, which starts like this:
“I call them “conversation enders.” These are comments that lead you to know, the moment you hear them, that the writer/speaker is either clueless or intellectually dishonest, and there’s really no reason to engage the person in a serious dialog.
I suspect we all have them. When I hear, “Tax cuts are fiscally responsible because they pay for themselves,” it’s a conversation ender. When I hear, “Evolution is just a theory,” it’s a conversation ender. When someone says, “Global warming can’t be real because it’s cold outside,” it’s a conversation ender.”
You can read the rest for yourself. It’s short. I’ll wait.
This struck me because over the last week or so, there has been a political spat happening on a friend’s Facebook page. She is, as I am, a liberal. Most of her friends are as well. However, there are one or two who are most emphatically, not. One in particular took it upon himself to educate us rubes why we are in so much danger now that Joe Biden is VP.
Once I stopped laughing over the ridiculousness of being afraid for national security under Joe Biden once we’ve survived eight years of DICK CHENEY, I got mad. This guy was condescending in his writing, and I don’t react well to condescension. However, I didn’t want to start a war on my friend’s fb wall, so I restrained myself. Another friend of this friend did not, though, and let it rip on the Republican.
I was so inspired, I added my two-cents. So did the friend who owns the fb page. Apparently, that was enough to get “Joe-the-Republican” (not his real name, obviously) going, and he left many lengthy posts about–well, I can’t tell you for sure because one of my personal conversation enders appeared early on in one of Joe-the-Republican’s rants.
“Nanny state”. He was saying that we Americans don’t live in a nanny state, and my mind completely shut down. I tried, but I couldn’t get past that phrase. To me, there is no engaging with someone who tosses out a phrase like that, no matter how erudite he may sound in his ‘logic’. Another one he threw out earlier on was, “You can’t deny that Bush kept us safe from another terrorist attack for seven years.”
That is even more egregious because first of all, yes I can. Anthrax. Look it up. Secondly, Bill Clinton kept us safe for roughly the same amount of time after a terrorist attack, and he didn’t start any fictitious wars or torture people to do it. Thirdly, Spain was attacked by terrorists some years ago, and they responded by pulling out of Iraq. No more attacks on them, either. Fourthly, just who was president on 9/11? Who was warned about 9/11? Oh, right, W., but he’s supposed to get a pass on that?
Finally, it’s a straw argument because we cannot know what would have happened had W. done the right thing. It’s like me saying, if I had been born white, I would be president right now. Who the hell knows? It didn’t happen; it won’t happen; it isn’t worth even mentioning.
As for the nanny state, I did eventually write that I would rather have a nanny state than a dictatorship that makes people disappear and tortures them at will–even American citizens. Oh, I erased that, but I meant it.
In addition, socialist is being tossed around the way liberal used to be. Since liberal is now acceptable, the GOP have to demonize the president in different ways. Sadly, none of them really seem to understand what socialism exactly is. In addition, socialism and fascism are two separate things. Plus, I am a socialist capitalist, so it’s not exactly fear-inducing to me to be called a socialist.
In the end, Joe-the-Republican got mostly ignored. Why? Because there is no arguing or debating with such a person. When I was younger, I would have tried. Now, in my golden years, I realize that it’s just wasted breath. I would rather focus on helping President Obama clean up the mess our country was left in by W. and the Republicans.
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