House of Eratosthenes

At the bottom of this posting is a picture. By giving that image a brief once-over, you can tell that I’m a cheapskate who doesn’t use Photoshop, but the point of it is to address something I’ve been noticing for the last few years. Since the September 11 attacks, Democrats have been circulating two different Talking Points, each of which is somewhat out of harmony with the other, and I’ve got a little bit of a burr in my saddle that they never seem to get called on it. I figured if the job fell to me to call them on it, one picture is worth a thousand words.

On April 6 of last year, as the elections were gathering steam Sen. Ted Kennedy took to the floor of the United States Senate and referred to the Iraq situation as “George Bush’s Vietnam”. Soon after that, Muqtada Al-Sadr made a similar analogy between Iraq and Vietnam. Al-Sadr, as in, the Enemy. Is it a logical leap to infer that Al-Sadr took note of, and made his own material from, Sen. Kennedy’s comments? What does our Vietnam experience mean, exactly, to a camel-fornicating weird-beard greaseball warlord in the Middle East? I honestly don’t know, but I would expect in world of homicidal Islamic extremism the Vietnam War is about as relevant as the Marshall Plan, the Tamany Hall scandal, and the Cherokee Trail of Tears.

Al-Sadr, I suspect, would have needed a model, and Kennedy gave it to him.

It’s not my intent to use this space to argue that Sen. Kennedy committed treason by providing “aid and comfort to an enemy,” only to provide background as to why some Americans had the opinion then, and have it now, that he certainly did. But by this time, Democrats had circulated the Talking Point that it was an unfair tactic to question the patriotism of loyal dissent. Apparently, they had done some research and found when people heard someone’s patriotism had been questioned, seldom if ever did the test subjects bother to verify the questioning took place, or to ascertain what had been done to provoke the questioning. Sympathy was instant, long-lasting once developed, and nearly guaranteed.

I can’t explain this. Apparently, you say “the Government blew up the World Trade Center and blamed it on terrorists” and I say “that’s a stupid, silly wild-ass theory”. Then you say “I’ve had my patriotism questioned for saying so” and now I say “Oh, well I guess there’s something to it then.” Makes no sense, but the tactic would appear to work somewhere. So the call went out to win arguments by lashing out angrily at Republicans for “questioning patriotism.”

The record would appear to suggest that calmly, harmoniously and boringly murmuring something about “Oh, by the way, so-and-so just called my patriotism into question” didn’t get the job done. To implement the Talking Point, you were supposed to get huffy-puffy. You were supposed to act like a cat suddenly dropped in a bathtub. Like having your patriotism questioned, was akin to being poked in the ribs with a pool cue in the same spot every time, and you were getting mighty sore. Hillary Clinton managed to model the proper mode of outrage a year earlier, during a speech at a Democratic fundraiser in Connecticut. You can view a humorous mock-up of her outburst here (hat tip to James Taranto, Best of the Web); the sound is genuine, the visual is not.

Now in the days between then and now, we’ve been buried in an avalanche of liberals angrily snarking around that their patriotism has been called into question (Google hits on “question patriotism” as of this writing: about 1,250,000). It’s been my general experience that these outbursts often bear little or no relevance to the dialog that took place beforehand; and where patriotism actually got questioned, more often than not there are facts that explain, reasonably, why the questioning took place. To take Sen. Kennedy’s case as an example, not everyone would agree that he’s unpatriotic, or that the episode above proves that he is. But a reasonable person would understand why someone else might consider the possibility, having reviewed the facts.

Democrats circulated another Talking Point, and this one has a much longer history. This Talking Point goes like this: Anybody who doesn’t agree with us Democrats, is a moron. Call them that. It would appear they have been experimenting with the moderate folks, and found they could get a lot of people to agree with the Democratic viewpoint, simply through bullying and coercion. If the test subject leans toward accepting a conservative viewpoint, or shows reluctance to accept a liberal one, blast’em. Call’em an idiot — it can’t hurt, and it might help. Kind of like using electrical shock on a lab rat.

Now, I can say stupid things just as noticeably and just as frequently as the next guy, so even though I’ve encountered my share of being-called-an-idiot I suppose there’s a chance that some of it is sincere. But when I see the treatment given to third parties, more often than not there is something terribly wrong: The insult is premature. As an observer, I don’t know why someone is being called an idiot. An insult isn’t effective unless the reason for the insult is crystal-clear.

If you call me an idiot, you may be commenting on my ability to gather facts. I say “Abraham Lincoln signed the Declaration of Independence” and you say “Lincoln wasn’t even alive at the time, you idiot.” Or you might be commenting on my ability to form reasoned conclusions from the facts once I’ve gathered the facts. I say “the weatherman is a liar” and you say “weather is not an exact science, you idiot.” Or you can question my ability to formulate sound tactics in response to a situation. I say “The freeway is backed up for miles so I’m going to take the backroads” and you say “If you do that you’re going to hit every red light, you idiot.” My point is, why are you calling someone an idiot? The conversation ought to have developed to the extent that there’s a clear answer to that question — it should have progressed to the point that the disagreement has been defined. Otherwise, the insult is just a way of avoiding discussion and that, in turn, raises a red flag that perhaps the facts are not on your side.

So we’ve had these liberals and Democrats running around for the last several years, burping out “questioning my patriotism” like clucking chickens, while on the other hand they call people stupid idiot morons anytime they encounter disagreement.

This is a blatant contradiction. One of these Talking Points is a complaint about people avoiding discussion, the other one is an avoidance of discussion in & of itself. Disregarding for the moment that as thinking individuals, we all have a sacred, unassailable right to form our own opinions about who’s patriotic and who is not — it’s hypocritical to imply legitimacy in questioning people’s intellect, but illegitimacy in questioning patriotism. To my way of thinking, it’s OK to do both, or else, not OK to do either one. To have one without the other is not only disingenuous; it adds a lot of confusion to the message.

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Friday, August 5th, 2005