Sunday, August 22, 2010

I'm Not Sure Calling Us "Lunatics" Will Be A Convincing Argument

But the media has run out of arguments to defend their unwavering support of Barack Obama. When the facts are against you, when logic is against you, when reality has overturned your ideology, what is left?

Name-calling. And if that's the best the op-ed columnists of the New York Times can come up with, well...it's an admission of failure, albeit that of a coward.

Presenting Maureen Dowd's last, best defense of Barack Obama - She's sane, everyone else is crazy:

Obama is the head of the dysfunctional family of America — a rational man running a most irrational nation, a high-minded man in a low-minded age.

The country is having some weird mass nervous breakdown, with the right spreading fear and disinformation that is amplified by the poisonous echo chamber that is the modern media environment.

The dispute over the Islamic center has tripped some deep national lunacy. The unbottled anger and suspicion concerning ground zero show that many Americans haven’t flushed the trauma of 9/11 out of their systems — making them easy prey for fearmongers.

Many people still have a confused view of Muslims, and the president seems unable to help navigate the country through its Islamophobia.


Wow. That's a lot of hate of your fellow Americans packed into five sentences. Just when you believed you came to your conclusions via logical analysis and the evidence of your own eyes, here's come Dowd to tell you no, you're dysfunctional, irrational, low-minded, a lunatic having a nervous breakdown, full of anger, fear, and trauma. Oh, and you're Islamaphobic.

Seems like the charges that a totalitarian regime gins up against a dissenter. And just like Dowd, though, if you change your mind and unwaveringly support her belief system (no matter how out of touch with reality, and how hateful it may be), you'll be just fine.

The Left will lap up this hatred like a cat on spilt milk. Expect Newsweek to lead with a "We Are All Insane Now" cover next week. Expect the liberal talking heads to regurgitate it often in the upcoming days as well.

Because deriding your opponents as insane accomplishes two things: One, it allows you to express your unadulterated hatred for those who disagree with you. Two, it excuses you from actually having to consider your opponent's arguments, as they are simply the ravings of a madman. And this is what supporters of the president have resorted to: cheap rhetorical tricks to insure they simply don't have to question their assumptions, no matter how reality crumbles around them.

I doubt many outside the Deep Left will find Dowd's column convincing. And for those outside Maureen's inner circle, the question of who is actually insane here now becomes an open one...

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