House of Eratosthenes

For some time I have noticed that while conservatives like to tell people what they should be thinking about, liberals like to just tell people what to think. For example, there really isn’t too much intellectual reason to engage in any of the following beliefs:

Hillary Clinton is a smart woman
We’d have fewer wars if women ran the world
A President Kerry would have much more credibility with the world
People want to kill Americans because of American policy (and would stop wanting to kill if the policies changed)
The United Nations can help us to achieve world peace
Gun control makes our streets safer
Bush knew about 9/11 before it happened

…and a whole bunch of other left-wing axioms that, when they are offered, are offered on platters of heated rhetoric rather than cool-headed consideration of available facts and reasoned inferences drawn from those facts. More tellingly — and I have a lot of experience to base this on — if a dissenting voice emerges to simply challenge what is being alleged, the support or proof for the allegation is almost never forthcoming. Instead, the liberal argues like a seven-year-old, with the tried-and-true “You’re STUPID!!!” line of attack.

In other words, liberals like to bully and intimidate. They say, think what I think, see things as I see them, or I will talk over you and call you a big fat stupid doo-doo head.

So the Democrats who are in power are really getting apoplectic about this:

“Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers,” Mr. Rove, the senior political adviser to President Bush, said at a fund-raiser in Midtown for the Conservative Party of New York State.

This is a whole different style of arguing from what liberals are used to. Mr. Rove is summarizing the news as he sees it. If you want to challenge this, you can’t really debate the facts that he’s summarizing, because, well, they’re facts — furthermore, he’s referring to events in the news that have been right out in front of all our faces for nearly four years now. If you wanted to argue this framework with him, you would have to examine his line of thinking. By offering repeated exposure to those facts, this examination would be more devastating to the liberal movement, than his original comment itself.

So Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi blossom forward with their righteous indignation, and their mock outrage, and their “cascade of criticism” and demands for Mr. Rove to resign.

If I was a senior Democratic advisor, I’d suggest a different defense and then wince a little bit when they rejected my advice — probably pull out my resume and start brushing it up.

After all, when someone says something damaging about you that is provably false or demonstrably falacious, you don’t respond with a “cascade of criticism”. Why would you?

Furthermore, they’ve offered an interesting contrast here. Karl Rove is expressing an opinion and then allowing the rest of us to go about our business, whether we sign on to what he said or not. Democrats are telling Karl Rove what he must do, telling President Bush what he should do, telling the rest of us what we ought to think. Must. Should. Ought.

I doubt any one among their leadership could comment on this without using one of those three words.

How very European of them.

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Go Get ‘Em, KarlFriday, June 24th, 2005

Go Get ‘Em, Karl
Friday, June 24th, 2005