“It’s plain hokum. If you can’t convince ’em, confuse ’em. It’s an old political trick.”
— Harry S Truman

Your Tattlesnake has had running arguments with various Teabaggers and Tea Party sympathizers for many months now and they all share the same tactic: Should you ask a question they can’t answer or make a point they can’t refute, they start screaming at you or rudely talking over you, as if the volume of their voice can eradicate reality and reason. This leads not to debate, but confrontation, and that seems to be what they want.

Beyond that, exactly how do you ‘debate’ people who insist:

— There are no racists in the Tea Party movement;

— It’s Obama and not George W. Bush who started the TARP bailouts of the banks and Wall Street;

— The terrible economy is exclusively the fault of Obama and his liberal social programs;

— All of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s social programs were complete failures;

— Social Security, Medicare, the VA and the GI Bill were/are not liberal social programs;

— Obama has raised taxes for the poor and middle-class;

— Obama is a Muslim/socialist/communist (take your pick) plotting the downfall of the US backed by George Soros’ money (and Soros was a teenage Nazi, too, incidentally);

— Rupert Murdoch is completely different from Soros, since he’s a loyal, patriotic American (Murdoch is, of course, from Australia);

— Obama was not born in this country and the ‘liberal media’ is hiding the truth;

— Sarah Palin has been shunned by the ‘lamestream’ media, despite the millions she’s made from doting MSM coverage of her;

— God has personally chosen the Tea Party candidates and opposition candidates are all the pawns of Satan;

— The only economic system God approves of is free market capitalism (you can look it up — it’s in the Bible somewhere);

— Jesus endorsed the death penalty; it’s obvious because he – duh – allowed himself to die on the cross;

— Liberals, not big corporations, are sending American jobs overseas to Communist countries like China in a conspiracy to position China to take over the U.S.;

— Liberals hate big corporations because they make people work for their money and liberals hate people who work for a living; they just want to reward blacks and Hispanics with ‘our’ money for sitting around on their fat asses all day watching TV and voting for Democrats;

— Blacks and Hispanics are taking all of our good jobs, thanks to affirmative action;

— Liberals are the true racists who want to keep minorities poor and in the ghetto and use organizations such as the defunct ACORN and the two idiots in the New Black Panthers to intimidate and threaten anyone who might disagree; white liberals want to turn blacks and Hispanics into slaves again;

— Unemployment compensation is a ‘Democrat plot’ to reward minorities who are too lazy to look for a job;

— There is no separation of church and state; you only have the right to believe in the monotheistic religion of your choice;

— Except Islam, of course, where they worship Allah who is nothing like the God of Jesus or the Yahweh of Judaism;

— Jesus hated homosexuals, despite the fact that he did not refer to them in the New Testament;

— Our Founders, like Thomas Jefferson, did not support free public education – that’s an idea straight from Stalin’s Moscow;

— Liberals are vicious fiends who enjoy killing babies through abortion;

— Liberals want women to work outside the home so that their children will be raised by state-run Obamacare centers and will become his personal army in the future;

— All liberals worship Karl Marx, Hitler, Stalin and Mao;

— All liberals are atheists who hate religion and especially Christianity;

— All liberals love Islam and support terrorists;

— You have no Constitutional right to privacy, and it’s all the fault of liberals and Democrats;

— Only Fox News can be trusted for factual information;

— Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh are a great men and teachers of the truth, and the proof of this is that liberals hate them.

Since they won’t believe any proof that contradicts what they are saying, are deaf to reason, and blind to their own hypocrisies and inconsistencies, it is impossible to have a lucid, adult conversation with them. In short, they’re crazy and they’ll drive you crazy trying to communicate with them.

Thank God these nutcases are only a small, if voluble, minority.

© 2010 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org.