No Clue
May 29, 2008
9:16 AM CST
It’s a plot to kill me.
The other evening, I fell asleep during the Bill O’Reilly show on Fox (a common occurrence), which meant that I didn’t have the remote handy to change channels when Dumb and Dumber (Hannity & Colmes) came on to the screen.
I woke up to the sound of Alan Colmes’s voice whining away. As I recall, the topic was Obama’s stupidity in saying that he would negotiate with terrorist-supporting governments instead of bombing the shit out of them (that was Sean Hannity’s take), and Colmes was having his turn at the topic.
So Our Alan asked the Stupid Guest (some pre-pubescent conservative pundit I’d never heard of) whether he was familiar with what James Baker III (SecState under Bush 41) had said on the H&C Show a while back.
Turns out that Baker III had told H&C that he’d gone to visit Syria’s Assad something like a dozen times over a two-year period at the request of then-President Blow Job Boy, and if a conservative like Baker III thought visiting Syria was a Good Idea, why wouldn’t it be a good idea when Obama Rama Ding Dong suggested doing the same thing?
[slight digression follows]
When I was in high school, we were taught the art and skills of debate; or, more accurately, those were imprinted into our brains.
Rule #1 when engaging in debate was, and is: Always know more than anyone else about the topic under discussion. Rule #2: Try to second-guess your opponent, and figure out how he will try and trap you, so you can have an answer or counter-argument ready. Rule #3: Always try to use your opponent’s own words against him.*
Back to Colmes’s question, therefore: why, if a conservative, experienced diplomat like James Baker III would agree to meet and negotiate with Syria’s Assad during the 1990s, would it be so bad to negotiate with Assad now?
Of course, the youthful pundit was born in 1990 or something, so he probably thought Abraham Lincoln won the Vietnam War. Needless to say, he spluttered and babbled, but essentially conceded the point to Colmes.
Which is where I wanted to shoot the TV with my 1911. (From the kids’ rooms: ”Mom! He’s yelling at the TV again!”)
The two simplest answers for Colmes’s question came immediately to my lips:
- Baker III has never been a conservative. Like his erstwhile boss, Bush 41, Baker is a liberal Republican and internationalist, and he would almost always prefer negotiation to confrontation (Gulf War I excepted);
- If Baker did spend all that time talking to Assad, it sure as hell didn’t achieve anything—Syria continued to threaten Israel, and continued to fund and support the thugs of Hezbollah and Hamas.
And then, the counter-question for Colmes: “If an experienced, wily diplomat like James Baker III was unable to achieve any palpable results by talking to a terrorist-supporting regime like Syria, what makes you think that the rookie Obama, with
no foreign polcy experience, could achieve any better results?”
But no… instead, I get to watch Alan Colmes (no intellectual heavyweight himself) have a battle of wits with an unarmed person.
The problem with TV exchanges is that they’re too short—which makes people like Ann Coulter and Mark Steyn, with their quick wit and nose for the one-liner, a godsend for these morons. But that’s not debate: it’s more like Neil Simon dialogue.
Of course, it is TV, and Bill Buckley has passed away. What more should I expect?
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*Liberals seem unable to understand any of the above debating rules, which, in the words of Ann Coulter, is why debating them is like debating a child with severe attention-deficit disorder. Liberals’ knowledge of any given topic is wonderfully shallow (hence their bumper-sticker nostrums for our problems), and they are unable to debate anything past the first couple of exchanges—which is why a debate on, say, health care turns so quickly into a debate on U.S.-Cuba relations and then another on taxing millionaires. Even in high school, we used to call those (derisively) “lily-pad” arguments: hopping lightly from one topic to another without getting into deep water on any of them. It is the infallible sign of people who have an opinion on, but no knowledge of a topic.
