Singing The Blues
By Michael P. Tremoglie (01/04/05)
In the two months since the election, liberals, who are unable to develop intellectual arguments to conservative ideas, are doing what liberals normally do when conservatives win an argument - they engage in ad hominems.
In less than sixty days, they have developed several methods to slander the so-called Red States and illustrate that Reed Staters are not bastions of morality and self-reliance.
One ad hominem – most closely associated with Democratic Party operative and consultant Lawrence O’Donnell – is that Red States are “client–welfare” states of the federal government. He claimed that Red States receive more taxes than they pay. The implication of this post hoc fallacy is that Red Staters are not the self-reliant people they say they are.
Another is to mention that Red States have higher divorce rates than Blue States. This specious claim was first made before the election by William V. D'Antonio, a visiting research professor at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. He wrote an article for the Boston Globe in which he revealed this epiphany. His conclusion was, “ Family values are much more likely to be found in the states mistakenly called out-of-the-mainstream liberal. By their behavior you can know them as the true conservatives. They are showing how to conserve family life through the way they live their family values. purpose is to prove that Red States are hypocritical when it comes to morality and marriage. “
How this data proves this is not quite clear. It is merely another post hoc argument.
Sophistry is a staple to liberals. All that matters to liberals are good ad hominems. Americans were recently treated to the spectacle of Tim Russert telling Jerry Falwell, on a recent Meet the Press, that Massachusetts has the lowest divorce rate in the nation while states like Texas have higher divorce rates. Across the nation the mainstream liberal media, which did so much to try to elect Kerry, proclaim that Red States are hypocritical. We have that bastion of journalistic integrity and impartiality, the New York Times news service, writing articles that state, “If blue states care less about moral values, why are divorce rates so low in the bluest of the blue states?”
Russert, not content with just one pharisaical argument, displayed a Newsweek magazine referencing that the risqué soap-opera "Desperate Housewives" is very popular in the Red States. Once again, the implication being that somehow all these moral Red Staters are not so moral. Russert also mentioned that Marc Cherry, the creator of the hit television series "Desperate Housewives," is "a somewhat conservative, gay Republican."
None of these facts - if true, and one does have to wonder about mainstream media veracity - prove conservative Red State immorality or hypocrisy. However, they are not intended to prove anything. They are merely intended to slander Red Staters.
Another tactic of liberal Democrats is to change the “moral values” paradigm. I first heard this proffered by Chris Matthews during his show. He said war is part of the culture of death; the Iraq war is inconsistent with being against the culture of death; ergo republicans and conservatives do not represent moral values.
A variation of this was also made during the aforementioned Meet the Press. Guest Jim Wallis, editor of the liberal Sojourner magazine, repeated the canard that the Bible says more about the poor than it does marriage or abortion and President Bush and the Republicans are not concerned about the poor.
Forgetting how sanctimonious this is - the fact is it is not true. Whether the good Reverend was lying or ignorant I do not know. However, he was not telling the truth.
Democrats and liberals believe the Red State/Blue State dichotomy of “moral values” was the reason Bush was elected. They are trying to rationalize their ineffectual election campaign. They would rather believe it was the ignorance and hypocrisy of Bible thumping, ignorant rednecks – not their lack of new or good ideas. As liberals are wont to do, rather than develop some original and innovative ideas to solve problems and perhaps gain voters, they instead proceed to think of ways to show that Red States are immoral and therefore hypocritical.
Was it not Harold MacMillan who said, “As usual the Liberals offer a mixture of sound and original ideas. Unfortunately, none of the sound ideas is original and none of the original ideas is sound.”
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