Memo to liberals: YOU'RE DUMB, TOO.
I've been sitting on this for a while, letting it percolate over the last month, but I think it's time to unveil the Top Five Dumb Liberal Fallacies. The five things many liberals believe that lost the 2000 election, lost the 2004 election, and will lose the 2006 and 2008 elections if we don't learn from our fucking mistakes.
FALLACY THE FIRST: There are more of us than there are of them.
You hear this one in a number of forms. This year, it was called Get Out The Vote. The idea was that pretty much all of Them were voting, and all of Us usually don't bother, so if all of Us vote, we'll win! Unfortunately, as it turned out, a whole bunch of them weren't voting either, and they were a lot easier to scare and prod and goad into voting. This fallacy is the root of the Cell Phone Hope and the Youth Vote Hope, and we know where that shit got us, don't we?
It also shows up in the belief that people, even Republican voters, are actually liberals if you sit down with them and ask them about individual issues. There are citable studies to back this one up and everything. But even if it's true, it doesn't really matter, because they're still voting REPUBLICAN. This ties directly into Fallacy The Second.
FALLACY THE SECOND: Elections are decided on the issues.
Please. The left should be prohibited by law from using the word "issues" in any non-periodical sense during an election year. And the year before. And the year after. People don't vote based on the issues. Even the people who say they vote based on the issues are lying to themselves and you. The people that actually do vote based on the issues will take care of themselves, because they'll look stuff up and figure out where they stand and they don't need you to tell them what the issues are. Everyone else is swayed by base emotions, personality, celebrity, tradition, religion, and whim.
Stop wishing for a "substantive discussion of the issues". It'll never happen, it can't happen, and nobody will show it if it did because nobody will watch it if they did. The "issues" are what you do AFTER you get elected.And even those don't matter if you can lie convincingly about what you did or didn't do.
FALLACY THE THIRD: People voting Republican are ignorant.
This is the tricky one. Because a lot of people voting Republican ARE ignorant. So are a lot of people in general. This is why elections aren't decided on the issues. The fallacy lies in the missionary fervor by which the left feels they can EDUCATE the ignorant into voting their way. Michael Moore said "Fifty-one percent of the American people lacked information (in this election) and we want to educate and enlighten them." Noble. Quixotic. IMFUCKINGPOSSIBLE. Or at least too much work for four years.
Educating people is difficult, time-consuming, and frequently futile. We shouldn't be concentrating on enlightening the ignorant. We just need to find a way to get them to pull the other fucking LEVER with a minimum of muss and fuss. We thought in 2004 that if people could just learn the truth, that Bush would be out on his ass. Bush is not out on his ass, and if people couldn't learn the truth about the CHIMP, they're not going to learn the truth about anybody. New approach, people. One that works.
FALLACY THE FOURTH: "The future of America is blue."
I've heard this shit bandied around as part of the left's desperate, post-election grasping at straws. Looking at the exit polls and the demographics and noticing that the young people vote Blue and the old people vote Red and conclude that if we just wait, eventually, all the blue young people will be blue old people and all the red old people will be dead. I have one question for these people: WHERE ARE ALL THE FUCKING HIPPIES? We should be choking on 35 years of accumulated patchouli and love beads by now, and we're not.
People get more conservative as they age. They have more to lose, more to protect, more to be scared of. Just ask Dennis Miller, assuming you can find a way to do that without listening to his answer. That's why the numbers are skewed. These people are blue now, but there's no guarantee they'll be blue by the time everyone terrified of gay marriage dies off. If that's what the left is relying on, we're more hosed than we look, and that's already so hosed you'd need a dozen of those mail-order motorized hosed organizers just to keep track of how hosed we are.
FALLACY THE FIFTH: There is a "middle" to appeal to.
Clinton grabbed a big chunk of the middle. Bush grabbed a big chunk of it back. The middle is gone Let it go. Karl Rove did. Everyone said he was fucked in the head, abandoning the middle to make sure his crazy assholes all voted, but it turns out he was fucked in the head like a FOX.
Kerry and Edwards appeased NOBODY by their half-assed stance on gay marriage, because there was no middle still susceptible to Clintonian half-assing on controversial issues. All they did was convince US they'd turn on Team Selfish Hedonism the instant it became convenient, and convinced THEM they'd turn on Team Missionary Position One Sunday A Month the instant it became convenient.
There are more, of course. But these are the big five for '06 and especially '08. Learn, change, or perish, people.