Too Tired

You hear certain bad arguments so often that you get tired of refuting them. They wear you down. So please pardon me, dear reader, if I just give you some conclusions without much content. I'm sure you can fill that part in. Here are two recent examples. (My apologies, yet again, that I'm arguing against the Left--the Right can be just as stubborn and foolish.)

First, something that strikes me as unbelievably blinkered, if not dishonest. James Goodale's review of the Rathergate report in The New York Review Of Books is breathtaking. He essentially misstates all the evidence favoring the documents in question to make it sound as though their authenticity is plausible, even likely. (He also seems to accept the standard of "false but accurate" as a fallback.) And he doesn't even mention the mountain of evidence proving to any rational person the documents are fraudulent. I'm speechless. Read it for yourself, maybe I missed something. (And maybe you'd like to email Goodale with a sentence-by-sentence refutation that I don't have the patience for.)

Another example is from a women who seems to want to understand, but then doesn't understand enough to ask the right questions. In Dissent, Lillian B. Rubin plaintively wonders "Why Don't They Listen to Us? Speaking to the Working Class." First, she should stop using the phrase "working class"--the poor in America already vote Democrat, it's the middle class everyone's fighting over.

She quotes from Thomas Frank's What's The Matter With Kansas? At least she realizes that Frank (one of those rare public intellectuals who always gets it wrong) has a certain contempt for the non-rich who vote Republican, but she actually does buy all his arguments that they're voting against their own interests. Sorry, Ms. Rubin, but you've missed where the argument should be.

Thus, she has little doubt the Left has the correct answers, she only wonders why the people don't respond. Maybe, just maybe, there are people who don't agree with you, and have good reasons. I suggest you argue with actual conservatives who understand what they want and why they want it, and not just assume people who vote against you are victims of mere miscommunication.