I think I said in a post a while back that they remind me of the old Saturday Night Live skit where Dan Ackroyd and Jane Curtain did a take off on 60 Minutes' Point-Counterpoint segment. Jane would give a reasoned, serious discourse on the issue at hand, and Ackroyd would always answer, "Jane, you ignorant slut."
When I was in college back in the dark ages (you know: the sixties), we had this little dustup in Vietnam. For some reason this was not particularly popular and there was some disagreement as to how the country should proceed. Anyhow, after the Ohio National Guard shot a few students at Kent State, about 500 of my friends and I had a meeting where we discussed what was going on. It was an open meeting, and everyone was encouraged to speak. Mostly, the speakers were against the war, but there were a few easily identified pro-war conservatives. After we more-or-less-politely listened to these people, a friend of mine got up and spoke, saying that he disagreed with their position. He briefly recapped what they had said, mostly vague concerns about national honor and containing communism, and then said that was simply not enough. He himself, who vehemently opposed the war, could come with better justifications for fighting, one of which was the substantial oil reserves long known to be lurking offshore. (Obtaining access to these oil fields was one of the Japanese objectives in WWII.) The pity, he said, was that the conservatives may be right about the war, but we would never know from this discussion, because the conservative position had been argued so inadequately. Without decent ideological competition those of us who leaned the other way would not do the hard work necessary to defend our position.
This is pretty much how I feel about these guys. They do not seem to be willing to do the hard work. It has to get beyond insults. |
