The Looney Liberal Chronicles: Chapter 13

 by Phillip Ellis Jackson  

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It’s time now to end this discussion where it began, with a return to my friend Harry.

Chapter 13:  Art Imitates Life Imitates Harry

I was worn down by years of endless communications with a man who, though quite intelligent and accomplished in his personal life, seemed incapable of expressing a coherent, non-partisan, non-contradictory thought. 

And so, having failed repeatedly to convince Harry of the patently absurd illogic he used as a substitute for legitimate discussion, I took another page from my pseudo-conversion to the Democratic Party (Chapter 8) and decided to out-Harry Harry.  I announced in advance to my brother Dan and Chris Jefferson that:

Phil: I’m going to insist that whatever I say is 100% right, and if I have to, make up facts to support my position.  After a couple of emails I intend to get really outrageous and see if he [Harry] can tell that I’m making fun of him. 

It was a practical application of the Limbaugh Doctrine — illustrating absurdity with absurdity of its own.  I half hoped that Harry would immediately see this for the foolishness it was, and modify his own debating style to begin treating a subject more seriously.  But down deep I knew that what I was getting from Harry was probably all that he had.  Being a Liberal means never having to confront reality.  You just blame your losses on the other guy’s treachery, or the stupidity of the American people, but never on your own shortcomings.  Harry had long since passed the point of no return so I decided that if, at the end of the day, I couldn’t teach him a lesson, at least I’d have some fun. 

The issue was a 2000 election recount being conducted by the Miami Herald.  I took a phrase I’d read about the paper’s methodology and decided to deliberately distort it.

Phil: The Herald used about 12 different standards.  If you allow people to fabricate votes, Gore will win.  But applying the Florida Supreme Court’s own directive that only the alleged undervotes be counted, Bush’s margin of victory actually increases!

Harry: The facts very simply are and I mentioned this in a previous email and you conveniently avoided it like the plague is that with the strictest NOT THE LOOSEST STANDARD, meaning that if you only count the ballots that had a clean punch through with no hanging chads of any kind, Al Gore and Joe Lieberman would have won the state of Florida by 3 votes.  Phil, you are getting as bad as me in taking things out of context.

Well, Harry’s initial response confirmed what I’d always thought, that he never actually believed his stirring portrayal of the “facts” in any of his previous emails.  They were simply a means to an end — the criticism and/or disparaging of George W. Bush.  I knew that he knew he wasn’t being serious in our debates, and I inadvertently tricked him into revealing that. 

But the concession didn’t make me happy, or even feel vindicated that down deep he knew my points were legitimate.  Instead, it made me mad.  I wasn’t engaging in this conversation with Harry and others just to see who could come up with the cleverest, most brutal, most profane, or most off-the-wall portrayal of the other guy’s position.  These were real issues, and I was interested in a real conversation.  Even if his “taking things out of context” remark was entirely tongue in cheek, it spoke volumes about how each of us was treating the subject.

So I decided to press the issue further, and keep playing Harry’s traditional role in our subsequent email exchange.  I simply ignored the evidence, and told him he was wrong.

Phil: No, Harry, you’ve got it wrong.  The Herald showed conclusively that Bush would have won by an over-whelming margin unless phantom votes were counted by Gore.  Bush has won every recount, including the only one that officially counted.

Harry: No Phil, I am absolutely right.  I am following the series in the Miami Herald for this whole week, plus it has been on the national news.   Kidding aside, you are not correct on this.

There was now a second reference to having an honest debate.  So I did what Harry would have done in the same circumstance if our roles were reversed.  I accused Gore of paying people off to stuff the ballot box (of course, without evidence of any kind to back up my charge), and began to slander Gore personally in my remarks.  Harry went crazy, switching entirely to capital letters in his response.

Harry: Phil says “Gore knew he was losing in Florida and paid people to falsify ballots.”  SURE PHIL, SUBSTANTISTE THIS PLEASE!!!!  Phil says “Fortunately Gore got slapped hard by SCOTUS, otherwise we would have had four more years of a lying, traitorous SOB in the White House.” AFTER THIS VITRIOLIC DIATRIBE, YOU ACCUSE ME OF HISTRIONICS???  Phil says “Both of these scum [Clinton and Gore] belong in jail, and you’re only worried that Bush isn’t up to your standards of eloquence!?!”

I thought the multiple exclamation points/question marks at the end of my original email was a nice touch, since I wasn’t only making fun of how Harry argued, but the way he actually presented his case.  Continuing on, I’ve reproduced Harry’s last rejoinder below, minus the all-caps that make it difficult to read.

Harry: Hey Phil, is this an example of Compassionate Conservatism?  Phil, be a nice guy for once.  Bush’s inability to speak is a mere manifestation of him not being taken seriously as a world leader.  It is more than eloquence and forensic skills, it is being a leader of the most powerful nation on Earth.  He’s a lying SOB and would simply never have fessed up to a DUI if someone had not found out about it.  He categorically refused to address it once the story broke until someone told him to get the hell out in front of the press and address it right on.  By the way, [referring to the downed U.S. aircraft over China], the last I heard the Chinese are still demanding an apology.  Sounds like déjà vu all over again to me!!!!

So, in response I simply repeated that Gore was a crook.  And I claimed that Tim Russert, an NBC news commentator, supported my position that the Miami Herald recount showed Bush winning convincingly if the votes he “bought and paid for” were cast aside, insinuating that the Herald had used this same phraseology.  Harry pressed me on this characterization because he had watched the Russert show too and had heard none of that.  What Russert did say, Harry contended, supported his (Harry’s) position.  I replied by emailing Harry that, “Russert never said that, and even if he did, he was wrong.”

Harry, who was treating everything I said with absolute seriousness, pressed me to substantiate my claim that Gore had used campaign money to buy illegal votes.  I reached into the depth of my soul and pulled out the best Harry-logic I could imagine to produce the “evidence.”  By now I’d linked Gore’s alleged voter payoffs in Florida with a claim of bribery concerning his support for the Kyoto treaty.  None of what I said made any sense at all, on any level.  The only thing I was doing was stringing together isolated words and phrases, and bits of entirely unrelated subject matter, to “prove” my points — just like Harry did.  I thought it was a rather tidy little piece of insanity, if I say so myself.  The only problem is that as I re-read this material five years later in preparation for this essay, my insanity seems a lot closer to the truth than anything Harry ever said.  Good satire always requires a strong element of the truth to be believed, and in this case Gore and the Democrats provide a lot of fertile ground.

Phil: Harry, just admit you’re wrong and get on with it.  Not only did the Herald analysis fully support a Bush victory, it’s more than clear that Gore took kickbacks from the environmentalists to support Kyoto — even though doing this would hurt U.S. interests.  Remember, other nations aren’t held to the same standard as the U.S.  It’s also interesting to see the continued silence of the Clinton Administration on this China situation. The People’s Army paid several million dollars in campaign bribes to him to get US top secret technology.  They expected Gore to follow suit (after all, Kyoto specifically exempted them from any environmental regulations). When Bush won, they felt betrayed and are now attacking us to steal our technology.  That’s why they forced the plane to land on their soil, so they can learn all its secrets.  The Democrats know they have a lot to lose if the truth gets out so they’re trying to force the US to apologize to China.  This is despicable.  They’re even hiring private detectives now to fabricate lies about Katherine Harris to destroy her future political plans.

When challenged on the Gore-Kyoto-campaign bribery charge I made, I simply turned the question back on Harry.

Phil: As for Gore and Kyoto, how the hell do you think he came up with enough money to hire all those attorneys at the last moment to go to Florida if it WASN’T a payoff?

Harry: Phil, what are you saying?  Do you assume this took place or do you know this took place?  Please let me know if this is your hunch or whether you can corroborate this as if you are right, this is dynamite. 

Please answer what proof you have.  I am asking as I am not aware of [any kickbacks from environmentalists] and this is political dynamite if true.  If it is your fertile mind conjecturing (through logical deductive reasoning of course) then there goes your credibility. Please advise as I am curious.

It was time now to end the charade.  I’d made my point, and I decided to let Harry in on the joke.

Phil: Okay Harry, I confess.  I told Dan and Chris I was going to “pull a Harry” and write emails like you write yours, and see how you responded.  It was an interesting experiment.  The more fanatical and outrageous I became, the more lucid and cogent your responses were trying to disprove me.  Of course, I simply repeated my original statements and ignored your comments, forcing you to come back with even more ammunition against me, which I ignored as well to simply repeat my original assertions. 

Which all proves that you are capable of picking apart an argument with facts instead of emotion.  So let’s see the same level of discourse coming from your side now when you present a position.  No hyperbole, no insults against Bush or unfounded conjecture as a substitute for analysis.

I must confess, though, it was fun just making things up instead of really knowing what I was talking about.  I thought about stopping all my phony messages earlier, but then again why should you have all the fun?  Take care, Phil

Harry took it all in good stride, and for a brief moment we actually began to have mutually intelligent conversations.  However, any hope that I had for the “new Harry” remaining around for a while was short lived.  After a couple of weeks of non-histrionics, Harry lapsed back into his old ways.  Bush was an idiot.  Bush was a moron who stole the election.  Bush lied about the same military intelligence Bill Clinton said was true to support his cruise missile attacks on Iraq, and so on, and so on. 

I could only conclude that when you base your analysis on wishes instead of reality, you see the world as a collection of desired outcomes and/or conspiracies designed to “steal” something from you.  And when you argue a point based on this foundation with someone who actually knows what they’re talking about, you get your head handed back to you on a silver platter.

For the most part, therefore, Harry’s basic modus-operandi in advancing or responding to issues was to dodge, distort, or denounce whatever charge I made.  That is, when he wasn’t just ignoring the points he couldn’t address all together.  And there was only so much of this I could take and still preserve my own sanity, so I had to cut things off — at least for a while.

Now breaking off our conversations was nothing new.  I count at least 5 such times throughout a four year period when we each had our fill of the other.  Usually I was the one who raised my hands and said “no mas” at the unwillingness of Harry to produce anything close to a reasoned thought.  It simply hurt my head too much to sort through the morass of conflicting, self-serving justifications Harry employed to support his opinion of the day.  We’d insult each other the way friends do (“my wife teaches retarded kids, and they have a better grasp of politics than you”), then go a few weeks or months without communicating.  But after a while I’d be tempted by some egregiously stupid comment a liberal politician or commentator would make and drop Harry a note, starting the cycle all over again.

So it was following the crushing defeat of the Democratic Party in the 2002 mid-term elections.  Despite Harry’s predictions of a Democratic rout on the national and state level, Republicans re-captured the Senate, remained in power in Florida, and Bush’s approval ratings remained high.  I “returned” a few old emails to him where he predicted the outcome, and of course was 100% wrong.  That got the conversation going again, but not before Harry took me to task for my behavior.

Harry: I honestly never expected to hear from you, nor was I ever going to write you again, nor have anything to do with you.  I was and still am incredibly pissed that after 30 years of friendship you’ve decided that my writings were so unnerving to you, or in the alternative, you deemed them such dribble that you wanted to cease and desist.
 
My view was not that I was making no sense, but espousing positions that you simply had no tolerance for.  There is no need for me to elaborate further as I think I have made myself abundantly clear.  Please do not ever mistake goodness for weakness. Instead of slamming you after the last email, I simply bit my lower lip and moved on.

Intolerance is a very scary trait and that is what I was seeing in you.  Impatience is one thing, but intolerance of another’s view is something completely different and that I will not tolerate.

With that said, it was nice to hear from you.

Visions of Bill Clinton biting his lower lip at the mention of someone’s personal anguish flashed through my mind, but I ignored the temptation to lead with this image in my reply to Harry. Instead, I focused on the point he made about our original dispute, which again completely ignored the facts of the matter.

Phil: Not intolerance for opposing views, Harry.  Intolerance for what I labeled, and still consider, a dishonest way to carry on a debate.

When I point out that the Democrats support abortion, and then say that abortion is the ultimate holocaust (i.e. the killing of innocents), it’s an invitation to tell me where my analogy is wrong.  That’s a debate.  But you can’t say — as you did — “I don’t want to talk about that” — and move on to another topic without conceding the point.  Otherwise, what’s the point of having a discussion?

When I make a point that you can’t answer, you simply ignore it and raise another issue.  You can’t argue one day, as you did, that the U.S. Supreme Court is impartial, and then when you don’t like their decision, say they are inherently biased. That’s not a debate, that’s juvenile.  There’s more and more of this coming from you, which is why it’s fruitless to have any real discussion with you.  And since I’m not interested in simply pissing on each other as a substitute for actually discussing an issue, I chose to break it off.

As for the email I sent you with your “predictions” about the midterm elections, take a good look at it.  As a substitute for analysis, you just spewed a bunch of Democrat talking points for the past two years. Instead of having an intelligent conversation with someone on the opposite side, all I got was your silly pabulum.  If you want to be taken seriously in a debate, have a real debate.  If you want to be a party hack, send it elsewhere — or be prepared to suffer the indignity of having to re-read your own words.

That said, there’s no point carrying this conversation on further [if all I’m going to get from you] is more party-hack substitutes for analysis.  I get enough of that listening to [the Democrat National Committee Chairman] blame the Wellstone funeral debacle on the Wellstone kids’ decision to turn a somber memorial for their parents into a political pep rally — against ‘everyone’s wishes.’  What a load of BS.

If you want to chalk this up as “intolerance” and bite your lower lip, feel free to do so. Once again you missed the point.

Okay, so I got the lower-lip jab in anyway.  Nevertheless, Harry and I went on to resume our conversation about the war in Iraq he supported but opposed, yellow cake uranium and other Bush “lies” about his reasons for deposing Saddam, in addition to domestic political matters.
 
As I said earlier when I spoke about Jack Kemp and the 1996 vice presidential debates, the one thing I pride myself on is my ability to see the truth of a situation even when I don’t favor the outcome.  I’m not going to say “black is white” or “white is black” just because the other guy wants a different outcome than I do.  If my guy kissed the pooch by what he said or did, I’d admit it.  I may not think it’s as serious a setback as my liberal friend insists, but I wouldn’t spin it as a “victory.” 

I worked with Harriet Miers when I was a senior vice president of the Greater Dallas Chamber of Commerce, and she was one of my board members.  She’s a fine person and a nice lady, but she’s not Supreme Court Justice material.  I was among the chorus of citizens objecting to the clear mistake President Bush made in 2005 when he nominated her for that position.  No matter how much I would have liked to see all of Bush’s decisions come across as brilliant and decisive, and no matter how cool it could have been to actually know an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, I thought it was a mistake to nominate her for that position.

In his more lucid moments Harry will admit to these types of things too, but only after history cannot be explained away by hopes, dreams and wishes. And then only rarely, when doing so doesn’t give me a tactical advantage in any other arguments I may offer.  Inevitably, though, the upcoming 2004 elections, and charges that Bush “lied” about the decision to invade Iraq, broke off the conversation again.  Our friendship and communication is currently in another hiatus phase, and it’s one that may last for a good many years, since I have a particularly low tolerance for some lines of arguments during a time of war. 

This isn’t to say that Harry is a bad person for opposing what I believe, just that I take things a little more personally now than I did in 2000.  At the end of the day Liberal flip-flops and excuses, while annoying and intellectually vacuous from my point of view, don’t carry with them the same implications for our welfare and security in peace time as they do in war.  A refusal to acknowledge a fact, or accept an analysis based on that fact, unless hit squarely across the face with it is a game I refuse to play any longer. 

Bush’s opponents won’t even concede that he won the 2004 election, let alone the 2000 election, so where is the common ground for discussion?  Their hatred for the President has so crazed many on the Left that they indulge in unimaginable conspiracies to explain away their electoral failures.  It’s this type of thinking that leads otherwise sane people to believe that Bush ordered the New Orleans levees blown up to flood black sections of New Orleans, or that he’s deliberately letting Osama Bin Laden roam free so he’ll have an excuse to continue the war in Iraq.

Whether Harry believes any of this or not, I don’t know, since we haven’t spoken since 2004.  What I can say, however, is that there are plenty of other “Harrys” out there — otherwise intelligent, respectable people — who have their delusions reinforced by a national media that never met a Conservative Republican who wasn’t corrupt or evil, or a Liberal Democrat they didn’t think was compassionate, intelligent, and pure as the driven snow.

Looney Liberal Chronicles

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