Wingnut Fatigue

There are times when I just can't climb on my hobby-horse and gallop to fight the wingnuts by pointing out the umpteen logical errors and falsified pieces of evidence in their diatribes. This is one of these times. I'm tired of telling the obvious: that these people are nutters.

How many different and interesting ways can I say that? Probably quite a few, but they all boil down to the same thing: We are required to debate people who don't deserve a debate; they deserve to be told to shut up. I read somewhere that Democrats consider politics to be a form of debate whereas Republicans see it as a form of warfare, and when it comes to these nutters this is correct.

One doesn't debate Ann Coulter. It's as productive as herding cats. One doesn't debate Bill O'Reilly. It's like trying to use a falafel for a soap in the shower. And one doesn't debate Rush Limbaugh, unless one likes the idea of talking back to the toilet bowl. None of these has any effect whatsoever.

The mentally healthy thing is not to listen to the wingnuts, to cut out Fox News and similar ranters and to stay away from the eerier websites on the net. But this may not be healthy in the longer run if conservatives indeed see politics as warfare, and many, many Americans do listen to the wingnut media every day. It's hard not to feel a moral obligation to straighten out its message here and there, to introduce some balance and sanity into the conversation.

But this can't be done. I can't fine tune something that is totally absurd to begin with. All I can really do is to start from scratch and build the true case to replace the flights of fancy they are pushing. This is a lot of work, and by the time I have finished the wingnuts have come up with ten more totally ludicrous, untrue and hateful assertions. Besides, I wonder if anybody is convinced by my meticulous work in the first place.

I'm going to take a different approach from now on. Instead of being the goddess of Sanity and Logic I'm going to become the goddess Even More Deranged! My accusations and fables will be more extreme, more outrageous and more hateful than anything Ann Coulter's nightmares could produce. Also, this will be much more fun.

I have to look for my tinfoil outfit. In the meantime, you can read this and this to find out what the nutters are hatching.