Misjudging the Opposition

I spent a considerable amount of energy yesterday fighting a crazy talking point. Hat tip to Warner Todd Huston!

"Obama Misspells Libya on Twitter Feed "

This is not a major issue, but it got into my craw. Normally I have a voluminous craw but somehow this stuck noticably in it, among the rest of the stuff. I think I was just fed up with what I see as the whisper campaign of half-truths and out and out lies. The thing that bothered me about this is, obviously, Obama doesn't write the twitter feed. I wanted to stop this one before it spread like wild fire and a whole nation of Republicans carried around an image in their heads of a stupid drooling Obama, who can't run the country because he can't even spell Libya.

I tried to get Huston to admit that Obama doesn't write the twitter feed, I argued with his Facebook followers, I made a troll of myself. And for all the wrong reasons.

What they made me realize, withough actually dropping the facade, is that they are all in on the joke. Of course Obama doesn't write his own twitter feed. Of course he wasn't born in Kenya. Of course Democrats aren't just like the Nazis.

The RNC talking points that I so vigorously fight here are, for the most part, a bunch of inside jokes that they won't 'fess up to, because that kills the punchline.

If it was a mystery why all the leading minds in the party seem to be entertainers instead of politicians, there's your answer. They have given up on solving the nation's problems. Sure they think things might be slightly better if conservatives ran everything, but the first six years of Bush taught them that also leads to crashing disappointment.

Conservatives are bitter cynics now, who are so bereft of hope that even the laws they propose are for fun - sometimes a parody of Democrat laws, like the one that would require all South Dakotan's to carry guns the way that they all have to buy health insurance; sometimes self parody, like the one that would allow child labor. But the one thing they aren't bothering with, it appears, is crafting laws to make life better for constituents, because they believe they are powerless to do so.

So I guess what I learned from this episode yesterday is for a default position, assume that what a conservative is telling you is a joke. Just clap them on the back and say, "Good one!"

(PS, One of Warner's tweet's from today: Drudge hit my Obama misspells Libya story today:... http://fb.me/SXYi3d3p I love it when a joke goes viral! Good one!)