"DON'T TRY THAT DEBATE CRAP ON ME!!!"
Defending the Indefensible

From Emphasis Added:

Right wing conservatism as it now exists in this country is, at its heart, designed specifically to concentrate wealth in private hands and break the back of all organized resistance. It is only natural that at a certain point, it will provoke outrage, first at its methods, and finally at its ultimate aims. The only question now is whether the con-men and card sharks will be able to make it out the door with their winnings before the whole saloon full of people they’ve cheated can unholster their six-shooters.

But for those committed in principle, or whatever passes for principle these days, to the intellectual enterprise of conservatism, the Bush collapse threatens a much more dire crisis. Once the narrative of greed, over-reach and failure has been established – and personalized with the leering, snarling faces of hateful individuals like Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Tom Delay, etc. – it will be incalculably more difficult to get the public to buy the same tired slogans and fall for the same push-button politics as before.

That’s where Plan B comes in. Last week, special prosecutor Peter Fitzgerald treated us to a lengthy baseball metaphor involving throwing sand in the face of the umpires. The only way conservatives can avoid accountability for their failures in the eyes of history is to so violently debase the discourse as to call into question the basic principles of fact, reason, evidence, objectivity and the plain language definition of language that could be used to indict them.

Some people think I spend too much time worrying about issues like “intelligent design,” which is, after all, a fringe position that only appeals to the truly dense and simple-minded. And it’s true: ID in itself is irrelevant. What bothers me is the calculated, self-serving intellectual vandalism being perpetrated by its more sophisticated proponents – attacking not just the idea of evolution, but whole chain of observation and deduction that led to the formation of Darwin’s theory in the first place. ID is an assault on the notion of argument from evidence, and an assertion of the primacy of dogma.

Click here for the rest (as of this writing, I was having trouble getting the permalink to work--if you can't get there to read this insightful essay, just go to the main Emphasis Added page, see link above, and look for the post for November fourth).

Years ago when my older brother, now a conservative lawyer for the energy industry in Austin, was a high school debater, the joke in our family was that whenever he was in trouble with Dad he would try to use his debate skills to argue his way out of paternal wrath, causing the patriarch to roar, "Don't try that debate crap on me!!!" My Dad certainly knows the shortest distance between two points: when confronted with bullshit, make sure to call "bullshit" on it.

However, such teenage experiences didn't seem to deter my brother from the notion that he could always prove, through skillful argumentation, that he's right about anything he believes, no matter how nutty. Years later, shortly after he was out of law school, the issue of burning the US flag and the First Amendment came up. Being conservative, he doesn't believe flag burning is protected speech. Here was his rationale: they can stop you from yelling "fire" in a crowded theater...

Of course, that's "debate crap" plain and simple. The crowded theater thing is based on safety--creating a panic without good reason is dangerous; people could be hurt. Burning a flag, however, especially under certain circumstances, like an anti-war rally, comes nowhere near the "clear and present danger" standard for regulating free speech. In other words, his argument was "debate crap." But it sure does sound good: the Supreme Court has ruled that free speech is not absolute, therefore it's okay to ban flag burning.

Over the years, I've come to realize that, high intelligence or not, lots of conservative "arguments" tend to play out this way. That is, they've got their beliefs, and use their smarts to retroactively construct rationales to justify them. These justifications sound good, and are just murky enough to set the stage for endless hours of "debate" with moderates and liberals. The point isn't to win these debates as much as it is to reassure themselves that they're right--it's the liberals' fault if they're too stupid to get it. Think Ann Coulter arguing about pretty much anything she supports, arrogantly declaring victory every time she debates, because she knows she's never wrong.

The fact that this right-wing approach to argumentation seems to have been pretty successful over the years leads me to two inescapable conclusions. One, most Americans are educationally ill served in the way of analyzing arguments. No surprise there; the schools are more about indoctrination than than thinking. Two, most Americans are easily swayed by the absolute certainty of the people to whom they are listening, and are easily influenced by loud voices and angry chest beating. Again, no surprise there: we are, after all, primates when it comes down to it; ultimately, conservative argumentation amounts to so much grappling for alpha-male status.

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