Draw and STRIKE! (love the blog name, btw) paints a true picture of what argument with the average liberal has become. Leftists tend to behave like this.
Take the issue of ObamaCare. Remember during the years ObamaCare was debated, how many times Progressives said the following:
OUTRAGE STATEMENT™ #1: “Why do you HATE sick people and want them to die??!!!”
OUTRAGE STATEMENT™ #2: “Why don’t you want to do anything to fix the health care problem? What’s WRONG with you? Why don’ t you CARE?!”
OUTRAGE STATEMENT™ #3: “How DARE you keep lying about what ObamaCare will do! No one will lose their health insurance plans or their doctors, you creepy lying liar!”
Starting to remember, aren’t you? Probably because the Left is still making OUTRAGE STATEMENTS™ in defense of ObamaCare right now.
Starting to remember? When was there time to forget? President Obama himself uses this form of argumentation, all the time. Which leads me to my next point.
Conservatives can construct all the logical cases on a given policy that we want. The logic can be airtight. The facts can be presented so clearly that no one could possibly argue with them.
So liberals don’t argue with them. They just play the OUTRAGE card to put conservatives on defense.
You can be OUTRAGED all you want, folks. But when it’s time to make a case for the actual policies you want to enact or defend, stop it. You can’t build public policy or agitate for change just based on the outrage you feel. You have to have an actual argument. Running around all the time screaming about how outraged you are may make you FEEL good, but it’s not an agenda for fixing problems and addressing important issues.
You want to keep abortion legal up to 26 weeks or even beyond? MAKE AN ACTUAL ARGUMENT then. Stop the constant misdirection & man up.
You want to defend ObamaCare? Quit issuing blanket denials & insisting ‘nobody’ has lost plans/Dr.’s due to the new law you passed.
Want to defend what 40 yrs of welfare policy did to the black family in America? Quit screaming ‘Racist!’ at people who address it.
Why? Why would any liberal bother building a case involving logic and facts when preening outrage will do?
Building a case based on logic and facts takes effort. Spewing angry talking points does not. Building a case takes thought. Spewing angry talking points does not. Building a case based on logic and facts takes cleverness. Spewing angry talking points does not. You have to know things to build a factual case. You don’t have to know anything to toss around smears and outrage statements. Well, in MSNBC’s case you have to know how to construct a good smear every now and then. But you don’t have to know much else.
As I said earlier, President Obama uses the same childish tactic all the time. To hear him speak, resisting Obamacare’s abortifacient mandate means that you are a bad man and want to deny access to contraception to women and we just can’t go back. His supporters take that argument and run with it. To hear Obama speak, resisting his vision of “comprehensive immigration reform” means that you are racist and anti-immigrant and we just can’t wait. His supporters run with that one, too. And so forth. If you believe in the sanctity of life at conception, or at any point prior to birth, this president says that you are anti-woman. Even if you are a woman.
It doesn’t have to make sense. It’s dishonesty married to false urgency. It’s liberalism.
As frustrating as it is, all that Obama’s tactic has resulted in, are two terms in the presidency and passage of a law that fundamentally transforms the relationship between citizen and state while also possibly wiping out the freedom of conscience that we all took for granted a few years ago.
That’s not too shabby an outcome, from a liberal’s point of view.
If the ends justify the means, and to liberals, they do because true right and true wrong do not exist, then there is no point to building a logical, factual case for anything. Ever. Just smear and OUTRAGE your way to ultimate power.
It works for Barack Obama. Or at least, it worked long enough to get him most of what he wants.
I don’t know what the solution is. Over the dozen-odd years I’ve been blogging I’ve seen online debates with liberals devolve from real discussions to the childish outrage game, to the point that it all has no point. I’m not sure that we will ever get back to the point that politicians believed that they had to build a case for their preferred policies based on appeals to reason, and facts laid out clearly and step-by-step. We’re a very long way from the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Maybe we will get back to a point where reason and facts matter, but probably only after liberalism has so utterly failed that its appeals to emotion become ineffective. But imagine the pain that we will all have to go through before we get to that point.
And then consider that hardcore liberals haven’t even learned from the experiences of the 20th century, that collectivism centralizes power in a few hands, and turns government into a machine of horror.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member