House of Eratosthenes

So you see me walking up to some guy, and I tell the guy “Eat poo! Because then I’ll be your friend and stuff. And it’s tasty! And if you don’t, I’ll be all, like, whatsa matta with you, you too good to eat some poo?”

And you come running up and advance the quite sensible argument of “Dude…no. No! That’s just wrong! You’ll get e coli and ptomaine and God only knows what else. Case of bad breath at the very least. Don’t eat poo.”

And then I come back with: “Hey, hold on there now. You have to eat something. You can’t go just eating nothing. You’ll starve to death. That guy over there wants people to starve to death. He’s bad! He doesn’t want anybody to eat anything.”

That third thing there is like what I’m hearing from the President lately, and a lot of His admirers. “I think America wants smart government (dramatic pause)…it wants a lean government (pause) …it wants a[n] accountable government (pause)…but we don’t want no government.” (0:47 to 1:03, here (hat tip to Hot Air).) Okay, now. Who, lately, have you heard seriously advocating an overthrow and complete dismantling of the government?

Far be it from me to speak for every citizen from sea to shining sea who feels some sympathy for the tea party movement. But I think it would be more accurate to paraphrase the platform as one of: Stop spending more than you’re taking in, because we are not going to be distracted from the red ink on the nation’s balance sheet by a bunch of gimmicks. Or: When a trillion dollars in outlays was unthinkable just a generation ago, and two trillion was unthinkable just a decade ago, boosting the spending level by a whole trillion dollars in one year is probably not a great idea. Especially if, while you’re doing that, you’re looking for whole new ways to spend even more.

See, this arguing style has a way of flipping things upside-down — it turns the moderate side of the argument into the extreme side, and thus the extreme side into the moderate side. To rationally thinking people, “eat poo” is an extremist position. My ludicrous and silly example at the beginning of the post inverts the equation, and makes the poo-eating proposition look moderate and any attack upon it look extreme (assuming you’re dim enough to buy into it). Well, that is what the President is doing.

The situation with our nation’s finances is such that “Whoa, slow the fuck down!” is just the reasonable position for any thinking man or woman to take. And I’m afraid that is considerably understating the matter. We have only the barest, slimmest chance of avoiding the fate of Greece, and that’s relying on the premise that Barack Obama is made into the one-term President that He richly deserves to become.

“Pay no attention to those teabagging rubes in the back” is a position that can only be taken by a charlatan…or one who is convinced he will somehow escape any personal responsibility in our nation’s resulting financial mess…or one who is both of those. “And come, gather ’round, let’s find new creative ways to spend even more” is pure insanity.

Uncle Kenny dealt with it this way.

We should all be writing letters that make Uncle Kenny look like a lovable teddy bear. Letters to senators, letters to congressmen, letters to state legislators, letters to the editor (if your local paper still has some circulation), blog posts, and keep fighting those liberal jackasses on Facebook.

They think we don’t give a shit about debt. It’s an old, moldering rotten corpse of an antiquated idea from the New Deal era. God willing, we’re seeing the final internment of that festering carcass. But I suppose there will always be some petty jealous jackals that can’t stand to see willingly unproductive people treated to their just desserts. They’d rather play their game of make-believe, that people who actually generate wealth must have stolen it from someone else, and people who’ve done not a single worthy thing their entire lives and have no talent at anything other than wearing a suit nicely and speaking into a microphone eloquently, are somehow responsible for every good thing that ever happened to anybody.

And they have all this contempt for the rest of us, for getting in the way of this childish fantasy. Well, pardon us all to holy hell.

Sorry. People who don’t produce, don’t get to lead. And insisting that a government live within limits just like the people it taxes, is not the same as insisting that it go away. It isn’t the same as anarchy.

See, this arguing style has a way of flipping things upside-down — it turns the moderate side of the argument into the extreme side, [..] Well, that is what the President is doing.

As I reacted over at my place, it ain’t just the President, buddy. Politicians in general. Especially, but not limited to, Democrats. And leftist bloggers.

You nailed it with the analogy.
- philmon | 04/24/2011 @ 17:59
“I think America wants smart government (dramatic pause)…it wants a lean government (pause) …it wants a[n] accountable government (pause)…but we don’t want no government.”

Remember the short-lived “Coffee Party” movement that started in 2009 as some kind of counterweight to the Tea Party? One of the Coffees’ principles was, “We don’t see government as the enemy.”

The implication, of course, is that those other rubes are anarchists because they want to see a rollback in spending and reform of entitlements. This is the sort of thing that makes me the most frustrated with the Left – they have to misrepresent the other side’s arguments, instead of simply answering them the way sane people would do.

It’s one of the reasons I quit hanging out at Right Wing News, because I got so sick of that moron D-Vega doing this sort of thing.
- cylarz | 04/27/2011 @ 01:18

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The “Eat Poo” ArgumentThursday, April 21st, 2011

The “Eat Poo” Argument
Thursday, April 21st, 2011