Arguing with a liberal

It was George Bernard Shaw who supposedly originated the famous advice against wrestling with a pig. I'm still trying to decide whether that also applies to arguing with liberals.

If you approach it with the right attitude, YOU can become the pig! Hmmm, there's an "in Soviet Russia..." joke in here somewhere. Yes... arguing with liberals... who are the diet Coke of Communism.... which means that you, since you're reading this right-wing Capitalist-Pig blog, are no doubt a Pig yourself, so... uh, yeah, oh hell, finish the Soviet Russia joke yourself!

When I was a kid, they hadn't invented sanitary landfills yet and people just dumped their garbage on top of the other garbage that was already there. This was usually done from the top of a hill or something so that the garbage kinda rolled itself down and out of the way. Anyway, county dumps were notorious for being infested with rats, and some of my high-school classmates liked to go up there around dusk and shoot rats. It was good clean fun and nobody cared if the rats suffered. They were just filthy, disgusting rats.

And if you cultivate the right attitude, arguing with liberals can become the same kind of sport. Face it: they're the most closed-minded people on the planet and will argue endlessly that Red is Green (or any of a thousand other contradictions) until they're Blue in the face, and will never, ever give in or even admit that they're arguing an obvious absurdity.

When they're trapped, they will inevitably fall back on one of a rather limited number of strategies, such as erect a straw man, change the subject (usually via a red herring or ad hominem), or just make up a flat-out lie. If you're sharp enough to catch this as it's happening and call them on it, you can pin them into a corner really fast, and then they get very angry, and a fuming, angry, out-of-control liberal is a lot of fun to watch.

NEVER try to actually "win" an argument with a liberal. It cannot be done. They will argue, for the rest of their lives if necessary, that Red is Green and will never, EVER deal with the fact that this is absurd. If you're going to have any fun at this, you MUST treat it as a sport -- like shooting rats at the county dump. You're not going to make one bit of difference in the rat population, or the liberal population, you're just doing it as sport.

I said all that to say this: I was involved in a recent email exchange where I nailed a liberal really good. It was a lot of fun. It all started with this email from my good friend C. Brown, which looks to me like a copy & paste from Matt Drudge's website:

CNN SHOCK POLL: MAJORITY SAY OBAMA DOESN'T DESERVE 2ND TERM

CNN poll: 52% say Obama doesn't deserve reelection in 2012
By Michael O'Brien - 02/16/10 01:35 PM ET
52 percent of Americans said President Barack Obama doesn't deserve reelection in 2012, according to a new poll

OK, whatever. I can't figure out what the "shock" is. I mean, it isn't as if anyone with a brain couldn't have seen this one coming. The man is completely incompetent. He has NO skills, NO experience and has NO idea what the hell he's doing. Of COURSE people are going to become disenchanted.

I was about to click "delete" when in came a "reply to all" from Mr. Brown's moonbat brother, Mr. M. Brown:

Do you know why?

Because he has not being strong on those morons (GOP), in Washington. He tried to find too many common grounds. You cannot negotiate with morons. Look at what they did to this economy.

Idiots another name for (GOP).

Oh. My. God. A six-point libtard just walked up right in front of me, grabbed the barrel of my gun, put it to his head, and said, "I'm stupid. Please humiliate me."

This is going to be fun...

I went for The Lie ("Look what [the GOP] did to this economy"). Easily disproved, very black-and-white with no gray wiggle room, and simple. I shot back,

> Look at what they did to this economy.

The economy did well under the Republicans. Look at the numbers.

Of course, he will never, ever look at the actual numbers. Liberals aren't interested in facts, and when presented with facts they will twist and squirm and apply Slippery Stuff and slide right out of the knot. You might as well tie a rope around a blob of Jello. I knew all that. I was just shamelessly baiting him.

Sure enough, he took the bait:

What? Where have you been?

Please don’t say that in-public, people may laugh at you. They may think that you have some serious problem…Okay.

You have to learn to ignore the insults and ad hominems. At least, until it's to your advantage not to do so. But that comes later, not now. Quoth I:

> What? Where have you been?

I have been in the Real World, where facts matter and partisan sloganeering does not.

I was playing it really, really straight. I really wanted to zero in on ONE fact, and make it inescapable: That the current recession was caused by the Democrat-controlled Congress that took over in 2007. Not by Republicans, under whom the economy had enjoyed robust growth for a number of years prior. I wanted to keep this discussion very, very focused on that simple, easily-proved fact.

He didn't see the trap. Next he posted:

You been in the real world and you did not know about the Bush recession?

Please tell me that you are not a Tea Bagger.

This one took a while for me to regain my composure. To me, the Left's use of a homosexual perversion -- teabagging (go look it up, I won't link it) -- to describe the Tea Party movement is so immature, so juvenile, so totally in-the-gutter, that it really enrages me. Yes, I realize that teabagging can be heterosexual -- but usually it is not. And neither is it normally consensual. I think it's this last part -- the fact that it's an initiation of force against someone who is usually being held down against his will -- that offends me the most about the practice.

And the fact that supposedly responsible "journalists" immediately began mocking the Tea Party movement with this sixth-grader epithet is... well, I think that ANY so-called news organization whose employees have used that term on-air should immediately have its broadcast license revoked. Because it is no longer a legitimate news organization.

But the point of this sport is to keep one's cool while you drive the liberal into a self-destructive rage. So I ignored the crude sexual reference and zeroed in on this guy's second Big Lie: "Bush Recession". Holy Cow! There are SO many possibilities... which one do I pick? "Yes, I am aware of the myth of the Bush Recession. I am also aware of Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny." Or possibly just a straight, "No such thing." Or, "Enjoying that Kool-Aid? Is it tasty?"

It took hours. And several re-writes. Finally, I realized that I was being baited by a Red Herring. AHA! Now I know what to do:

> You been in the real world and you did not know about the Bush recession?

Please do not change the subject. We were talking about the Republican Party -- not individual Presidents -- and their effect on the economy.

Please also keep your comments within the realm of facts. A 33% increase in GDP is NOT a "recession".

When arguing with a liberal, you HAVE to keep the discussion on the subject, because when they get backed into a corner, they will ALWAYS change the subject rather than admit they're wrong. Just what the hell is wrong with someone who can never admit s/he's been wrong, anyway? I detest such people.

The "33% increase in GDP" refers, of course, to the verifiable numbers from 1Q 2001 through 4Q 2008 - quarters during which George Bush was actually in office. You see, it's another favorite tactic of liberals to use periods when the President in question wasn't even in office (usually they'll use the year of the election as if he was actually in office that year). Another one is to credit the President with things that were actually done by Congress. This is where I actually intended to go with this conversation: to prove that the current recession was caused primarily by Congress, NOT the President. But in this particular case, the numbers corresponding to Bush 43's term work very nicely to put this fool in his place, so in the end I never got around to dealing with the REAL facts. Ah well.

I had him by the balls. Tea Bagger indeed! Who's the teabagger NOW, Lib-boy?

And indeed, he gave up. His next email:

Okay, you proved the point people have being saying. Republicans are not the sharpest knives in the drawer. Even O’Reilly said that on his in a joking way on his show. I can sell you a bus ticket to the moon and you will buy it.

You do not even have the prerequisite to have a conversation with me. Go talk to you Tea Bagger friends.`

Yep. Utter defeat. This is the closest you will ever get a liberal to admitting it. I pondered various catty replies for a while, then decided the best thing to do is drop it. I already had him and he knew it. No use getting my friend into the middle of a family row that was going to cause him grief.

Besides, the man had just asked me to leave him alone. I wanted to respect that. So I decided to just let the whole thing drop and go on with my life.

That should have been the end of the story. But today Mr. M. Brown writes me -- again, in a "reply to all" (same people that were included in the entire exchange above) and says,

Ken, how would you class Medicare?

Bait.

No matter how I answer, there will be a thousand gray areas where he can change the subject, obfuscate the issues, drag one Red Herring after another into the dust-cloud, and keep an argument going until everyone is sore at everyone else.

I'm not going to do it. I've had my fun; nobody's mind is ever going to be changed among those who were CC:d throughout this whole thing, and it's going to turn out badly. I need to put an end to it, NOW. But I also want to get in one final jab at that "teabagger" bullshit.

It took me all day. Finally, I wrote:

> Ken, how would you class Medicare?

Why are you asking me? Just yesterday, you declared that I "do not even have the prerequisite to have a conversation with" you. If I wasn't smart enough to have a conversation with you yesterday, then I am probably not smart enough to have one with you today either.

In the mean time, you have repeatedly refused to engage in ANY conversation that relates to any actual facts -- but you keep displaying a morbid curiosity about my genitalia, and what I do with them, and with whom. Frankly, that is just plain creepy. Listen, if you're that fascinated with teabagging (or being teabagged -- don't tell me which, I don't care and don't want to know), just put an ad on Craig's List and be done with it. Leave me out of it: I'm not queer and if I was I sure as hell wouldn't be discussing it with YOU.

I'm sorry, but I don't have any more time for you. Wallow in your hate if you must, but I shan't be a part of it.

I hope I don't hear back.

But I did hear back from my friend "C". He's laughing his ass off at the "morbid curiosity about my genitalia" part. Apparently he's been taking some grief from his family for a LONG time for being a conservative.