"You're Too Dumb"

Listening, skin crawling, to the utterly despicable Laura Ingraham Show the other day, she said something to the effect of, "The liberals think you were too dumb to see what was really going on. They think that if only you really knew what was happening, you would have changed your minds."

More brilliant tactics by the conservatives! Have the very operatives you use to spread your lies and deceit tell those she has been lying to, "The liberals think you're dumb because you don't see that you're being lied to!" No one wants to think of themselves as dumb. Thus, Ingraham reinforces her listeners' emotional attachment to being right. "If I'm wrong, and I was being lied to, I must be dumb. Therefore, I have to have been right and wasn't being lied to." This is, of course, Argument by Negative Consequences, and makes no sense at all, but if it works...

This, by the way, is why I think that the post-election reaction of many liberals, that the American people are such idiots! is not helpful. If the conservatives are lying to the people but telling them, as they are, that "you're smart, you're the best and the brightest, you see through all the liberal media BS," then telling the people they're dumb not to see the lies is only going to reinforce peoples' feelings that they're too smart to be lied to.

I have come to believe that the current climate and the politics of destruction being used by the conservatives can only be fought by like tactics. I know this isn't going to be a popular position amongst Democrats and liberals. We like to think we are the good guys. We don't do what the conservatives do, or we would be bad guys too. But politics today are like a knife fight. We may not have decided that there should be knives in the fight, we may feel that using a knife is bad and that we shouldn't use one, but the fact is, if the liberals go into a knife fight unarmed, of course we're going to get our asses kicked. That's just the way of things.

We don't like to believe that, in life, the ends sometimes justify the means. But our opponents clearly believe this. The question is whether we would rather lose over and over yet "be right," and let ourselves and the country suffer the consequences, or get our hands dirty and join the knife fight. The question is whether liberals have the courage of our convictions. Is doing what's right more important than being right? We have to choose. And if we decide that being right is more important, we're going to have accept that, in likelihood, it means conservative hegemony for the forseeable future.

Just my opinion, of course.