If the law is on your side, pound the law; if the facts are on your side, pound the facts; if neither is in your side, pound the table.Usually, to understand what the national party is doing on any given issue, it's best to get your hands on the actual talking points, as opposed to trying to pierce the veil of any given politician's ignorance of the topic. But has political ideology become so completely postmodern that it simply no longer possible for both sides to agree on basic historical facts? I've grown increasingly concerned about this. Republicans seem to be simply pounding the table on the stimulus bill with patently false condemnations.
New RNC chair Michael Steele is quoted to have said: "Not in the history of mankind has the government ever created a job."
Really? Really?
There are all sorts of things you could say about how much the stimulus bill sucks that would be rooted in truth and to which I could grudgingly agree. Do that. All I see are counter factual arguments, from FDR's New Deal making the Depression worse, to now, apparently, this.
In high school I had to write a critical essay on a book that I didn't want to read. So I skimmed through the book, picked a few quotes, and summoned all my powers of bullshit to fill the paper out to the required length. I failed in a completely spectacular way.
What I selected to base my entire opposing position was, in fact, so completely divorced from the range of the book that my paper was marked up almost entirely with "???" and "see me after class," and "buggery means sodomy, is that really what you're trying to say?" I will always remember the lesson, which could be summed up in the famous quote of physicist Wolfgang Pauli, "That's not right. It's not even wrong."
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