If you’ve ever been face-to-face with a bona fide Kool-Aid drinking right-wing regressive true believer, you’ve likely been rendered speechless by their inability to string two thoughts together using anything remotely resembling the recognized rules of logic. I call this malady LDD or Logic Deficit Disorder and it is indeed epidemic among the regressive right.
Considering Bush himself is a long-time chronic LDD sufferer, it’s no wonder his worshippers in the regressive rank and file are also infected. Even people who ought to know better enthusiastically queue up to put their critical minds on hold just long enough to deceive themselves into thinking BushCo or any of its lie-spewing mouthpieces in the corporate-owned MSM are making one iota of sense. While I’m convinced regressives argue so illogically, their mistakes could be turned into a damned funny book, for brevity’s sake, I’m only going to highlight six of their most egregious reasoning errors.
False Dilemma: Regressives commit this fallacy by presenting two positions on an issue as though they’re the only two, exclusive of all others. It’s wildly popular with one-dimensional non-thinkers who parse the world into neat, simple, and easily recognizable bits like ‘all good stuff over here’ and ‘all evil stuff over there’. Sound familiar?
Thanks to the simpletons in the media and the ad nauseum repetition of cowboy-ish one-liners like ‘you’re either with us or against us’, BushCo’s use of this fallacy is indicative of what American politics has become. It’s all about left/right, conservative/liberal, religious/secular, etc. The lack of middle ground and those pesky grey areas that regressives loathe makes these little snippets just small enough for regressives to wrap their stunted little minds around.
So, either you agree with BushCo or you’re a terrorist, either you support the Iraq invasion or you love Saddam, either you worship BushCo or you hate the troops, either you’re anti-abortion or you’re a murderer, either you support torture or you’re a girlie-man, either you adore Chimpy’s appointments or you’re an obstructionist, either you love regressive policies or you’re a Communist (or a terrorist, fag, hippie, or girl named Nancy).
See? Easily digestible. No nuance. Minimal complexity. Perfect for lobotomized regressives.
Straw man: I covered this one in a previous article for Smirking Chimp, but it definitely merits repeating. A straw man is an inaccurate representation of an actual argument that, thanks to its new straw form, resembles but is much easier to destroy than the original. Thus, rebuttal requires only that the listener be ignorant of the genuine article and, among the Regressive Right, ignorance is like oxygen – they desperately need it to survive.
So when über-regressive Svengali Karl Rove says liberals wanted to coddle terrorists post-9/11, he attacks a straw man since he knows no liberal ever said such a thing.
When regressives oppose evolution because ‘humans didn’t come from monkeys’, they attack a straw man since no evolutionist has ever said such a ridiculous thing.
When they equivocate pro-choice with pro-abortion, they attack a straw man since pro-choicers are not for abortion, but support the right to choose whether or not to have an abortion.
When they say the progressive solution to gun violence is marching into your home and forcibly taking your weapons away, they attack a straw man, since no reasonable lefty advocates such a thing.
Sadly, the list could go on much, much longer.
Ad hominem: Strictly speaking, this gem means ‘against the man’ and occurs when BushCo, instead of defending themselves against someone’s accurate portrayal of some war crime or internal scandal they’re involved in, smears the accuser instead.
This happened with Paul O’Neill, Scott Ritter, Richard Clarke, Joe Wilson and many others. BushCo says they’re all lunatic liars. Never mind they were right; they attacked the Holy BushCo. Thus, they must be crazy, for as we all know, BushCo does and can do no wrong. This nonsense is then dressed in patriot garb and trumpeted across the land by the likes of the drug-addled Rush Limbaugh and just-plain-nuts Ann Coulter. Supplemented with other verbal goodies like all liberals and Democrats hate America and are traitors who ought to be tortured then shot and dissent is un-American and blah, blah, blah, they succeed in tarnishing the reputations of truly heroic public figures to cover their criminal asses.
Why discuss facts and make cogent arguments when it’s far easier to get the angry white pinheads out in hate-radio-land to froth at the mouth like Pavlovian dogs by feeding their obsessive hatred for things they don’t understand and blaming evil left-wingers, gays, feminists, and anti-war peaceniks for all their troubles? Once that gang of nitwits are good and whipped up, the truth becomes irrelevant.
Groupthink: This one brings to mind the robotic obedience and blind devotion of hoards of wannabe Nazis at those scary old rallies at Nuremburg. It is borne out of ethnocentrism, the universally erroneous notion that ways of life can be ranked on scales of moral superiority, and the belief in the infallibility of one’s own nation, government, and all the actions taken in its name.
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