I hate arguing with liberals

I really do.

I don't mind a good debate. I think they help to sharpen the mind and help the open minded to learn and grow. Some liberals are willing to debate that way, and I have learned to respect them.

Most liberals though do not debate that way. One of my fellow bloggers on another site comes to mind. Once he seemed rational and willing to debate, but he already had some definitely annoying quirks.

For one thing he constantly belittles the people whose policies he disagrees with. Can you tell me how it bolsters your argument to call President Bush "the shrub"? Sure, it's a bit of a witticism, but I find it in poor taste. Admittedly, there are quite a few on the right that do the same thing. Just as much as I despise it in liberals, I despise in it conservatives.

Surely you've noticed this about many bloggers, particularly on the left. Why is it that we continue to read comparisons of President Bush to Adolph Hitler? Or to a chimpanzee? Why is it that we continue to hear how dumb and unintelligent President Bush is? Or how inarticulate?

Do these attacks on the person really strengthen the left's arguments? I don't think so. For that matter, are these particular attacks (Let's leave aside some of the other attacks for now, and just address these.) on President Bush accurate?

Adolph Hitler was a racist monster. Whatever else may define him in your eyes, that defines him in mine. Only a racist monster could have conceived of the holocaust, the attempted mass extermination of an entire race.

Whatever else you may think about President Bush, I hardly think you can call him a racist. He has appointed many representatives of various minorities to his cabinet and to offices of power. He judged these people on their merits, and not on their race.

He has done more to openly welcome immigrants from other nations than previous Presidents, especially with regard to our southern border, offering amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants, most of whom come from Mexico. These are hardly the actions of a racist.

I'm sure that the left would choose other areas to compare President Bush with Adolph Hitler. Civil liberals that want to discuss this are welcome to comment.

As for whether President Bush resembles a chimpanzee in appearance all I can say is what a childish thing to say about anyone. This is as bad as the racist attitude that someone is inferior because of the color of their skin.

How about President Bush's intelligence. Liberals frequently call him a moron, or other derogatory names relating to their perception of his intelligence. Yet the man went to a prestigious ivy league college and graduated. I seriously doubt that such institutions of higher learning are accepting morons as students. For that matter, one of the liberal examples of "intelligence" was Sen. John Kerry, a man who actually received poorer grades in college than President Bush did.

So these particular attacks are hardly accurate. Yet we continue to see them from the left.

As conversations with this blogger continued, I found still more things I didn't like about arguing with him. For one thing, his belittling of people doesn't stop with public figures. He also likes to belittle the people who are having discussions with him. In a recent post, he used obscenities to describe a commenter. That's hardly a way to encourage debate. It's also not exactly a good way to encourage readers to come to your blog. Again, I've seen this on conservative blogs too, and it's not a pretty site.

I recently had a similar experience with another liberal blogger. I recently went to comment at another left wing website in response to an article there. One of the commenters proceeded to call me names, which included several obscenities. He also questioned MY intelligence. I asked him to tone it down so we could have a reasonable discussion and it just got worse. He even LIED about being a "conservative", just not a Bush Kool-aid drinker. I went to his website and saw that it's a prime example of a left wing site, just overflowing with examples of Bush Derangement Syndrome.

Post after post on this blogger's site were about a new "emem" he had discovered (he seems to have invented the term too). They were essentially a recitation of Keith Olberman's accusations against President Bush. These accusations had no supporting material to back them up, and in fact could easily be refuted. It seemed as if repeating this "emem", especially in a very large font size with big red text, would make it true, despite the lack of other support.

Which brings me to another problem I have with liberals. They LIE without shame. The "emem" discoverer even goes so far as to proclaim it at the top of his blog, saying that you can't trust anything you read on his site, because he "makes up" his own facts.

The biggest charge about lying though comes from the left. They constantly proclaim that "Bush Lied, People Died". It's a crock of horse manure, and many of them know it. We currently have several Democratic representatives trying to push various impeachment measures through Congress based on charges that President Bush, or Vice President Cheney "manipulated" pre-war intelligence in an effort to bring us into war.

The problem with that is a lot of that intelligence was gathered before President Bush was even on a Presidential ballot, and a lot of the Democrats were pursuing the very same agenda of "Regime Change" in Iraq back in the 1990s. There are multiple online sources with quotes from these Democrats as far back as 1998 (perhaps even further) talking about the danger Saddam Hussein and Iraq posed to world and National security.

Ask me, and I'll provide you with links to the material. Bullwinkle has VIDEO. John W. Lillpop has quotes. I can even provide you with pointers to the text of Federal Laws that called for regime change in Iraq as far back as 1998.

Liberals like to ask the question "where's the WMDs", ignoring the fact that that wasn't the sole reason we went to war. They like to call it a war for oil, even though most of Iraq's oil goes to nations other than the U.S. They like to say "Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11" as if the President or the Vice President said that he did (they never said that, only that Iraq had links to Al Qaeda, which has been proven). They play the "moral equivalence" game, equating the treatment of illegal enemy combatants with criminals whose rights include not being forced to give evidence against themselves.

Ask them about it though, and like the first liberal blogger I mentioned, they'll tell you to go look it up. And that's another thing I hate about arguing with liberals. They'll make wild assertions, claiming there's data to back them up, but they won't provide the data. They want you to do their homework. They want you to go out and research their points, from their point of view, rather than presenting you with the evidence.

Present them with documents. Present them with original source material. It doesn't matter. If it doesn't fit their pre-conceived world view, they'll ignore it or dismiss it. Present them with the findings of the Congress of the United States, and they'll tell you THOSE aren't the reasons such and such was done, no - go look up so and so's writeup on the reasons, without a link, and as if some pundit's analysis or opinion holds more weight than what the people who took the action say is why they took it.

Liberals aren't alone in this, but in just about every political conversation I've had with a liberal, this is the way things have gone. I've been wrong occasionally, but most of the time I'm either lied to, or the conversation devolves into name-calling and ad-hominem attacks. Most of the rest of the time they'll try to hijack the conversation and argue about something else.

Lord help you if that happens, because if you respond to their new line of argument, someone else will join in the fray and accuse you of throwing up a smoke screen to avoid the original issue. And naturally they won't say anything about the person who originally hijacked the conversation.

One thing about conservatives. For the most part, conservatives enjoy free speech, and support your right to free speech. The same cannot be said for liberals. Speak out on something you feel passionately about and if it doesn't fit with the liberal agenda, they'll do what they can to squelch your speech.

It might begin with a simple call to "get off the soapbox", as recently happened to me on another one of my blogs. Or it could be a pie in the face, as has happened to many conservative speakers. Or liberals could simply gang up in the audience and shout a conservative speaker down. I don't think I can recall a single case where a liberal speaker was shouted down by a conservative audience. Can you?

Of course now we're hearing all about the "fairness doctrine". It's supposed to be the answer to right-wing talk radio. It's really just another attempt to silence voices the left doesn't agree with.

Some on the left will be sure to bring up the Dixie Chicks, claiming that when people boycotted their concerts and wouldn't buy their albums that they were being censored. Sorry Charlie, as the tuna commercial used to go, but that argument just doesn't work. There's a difference between censorship and refusing to support speech you disagree with. The Dixie Chicks weren't censored. They were free to spread their message of dissent. It just wasn't a popular message and their popularity suffered for it.

Disagree with a liberal though and you'll be demonized. If you are skeptical about global warming (or is it global cooling, or just simply human induced climate change), then you're the equivalent of a holocaust denier and the left will take your name for when they hold their Nuremberg style trials for climate change deniers. If you want national security as opposed to giving amnesty to millions of law-breakers who don't have our nations' interest in mind, why you're a racist. Speak out against "affirmative action" or say that "the only way to end racial discrimination is to stop discriminating based on race" and you'll be called a racist, or accused of trying to set back the hand of progress.

In fact, the single thing I dislike most about arguing with liberals is the shadenfreude and hypocrisy exhibited by some of them whenever a conservative gets in trouble. If a conservative is merely accused of talking to a minor about homosexual sex, he's demonized and hounded out of office. If a liberal actually commits a homosexual rape with more than one minor he's lauded as a great officeholder.

We saw this happen just a bit over nine months ago. Now with the "D.C. Madame" releasing her phone records to the public my blogging "friend" is looking forward with glee to the outing of some more conservatives. That's not enough for him though. He's even on record publicly hoping that it will drive some conservatives to commit suicide. Yet this same "man" says that he's not bringing "hate" into our discussions. Instead he accuses me of doing so.

I HATE arguing with liberals. I really do. I hate it so much that I've had to cool down for a few days before I felt I was ready to post again. Now you know why.

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Originally posted at Perri Nelson's Website.

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Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Perri Nelson's Website, The Virtuous Republic, The Random Yak, DeMediacratic Nation, Jeanette's Celebrity Corner, Right Truth, Adam's Blog, Big Dog's Weblog, Webloggin, The Amboy Times, Conservative Cat, Diary of the Mad Pigeon, The World According to Carl, Pirate's Cove, Nuke's news and views, Planck's Constant, CommonSenseAmerica, Dumb Ox Daily News, Right Voices, and Public Eye, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.