Passive-Aggressive Politics: When Democrats Commit Crimes, the Republican Reaction is the News

I had to think about this for a while so that’s why my comment is so late. I often hear something that I need to mull over in an attempt to “get it right”. Sometimes I know there’s something wrong but can’t quite put my finger on it so I have to trot it out, look at it from all angles, poke it, prod it, maybe even slice is open to see what’s bothering me about that thing. I heed my inner voice but I also do my best to avoid things like confirmation bias and a natural tendency towards assertive belligerency. In my own defense if I wasn’t the kind of aggressive personality I am I’d be dead and that’s not something most of you ever had to deal with.

Years ago I was driving along going to a client site for IT work and I was listening to Leo LaPorte’s “Computer Corner” on the radio. Leo was discussing anti-virus software and in the drift of the show he eventually got around to naming some very specific instances where you might not really need antivirus protection … at that time. Like I said, this was years ago.

I cringed so hard I could have wrecked the car. Because I know people as well as I know computers and I knew that somewhere out there were people that didn’t hear, or understand, or would not limit themselves to those very specific instances. So their minds elided over those specifications to ‘The computer guy on the radio says you don’t really need antivirus software’.

You do. It doesn’t matter what kind of computer, tablet, phone or operating system you’re using, you need AV protection. Leo LaPorte was technically correct in what he said, the failure is in how the listener perceived what he said and being as I was in Los Angeles at the time I’m sure there were thousands of listener failures.

I got that same twinge when I heard Bill say ““When we say things like ‘We cannot stoop to their level’ that is ego talking.”

He’s right the way he meant it Even so there are a lot of people who heard that it’s ego talking to oppose lies, cheating, manipulation, maneuvering for raw power and the nation be damned we’ll rule over the ashes, abuse of human psychology to get power, emotional predominance over reason, buying votes with government largess and all the other despicable things the Left does down there at their level.

Those tactics are not OK and saying they’re not OK isn’t ego talking.

History teaches us that the most often result of a tyrant being deposed is that he’s replaced with another tyrant. The people deposing the first tyrant are every bit as bad and the same sort that put the first tyrant in power. Our American experience is an exception that proves the rule. Also, we didn’t depose the tyrant King George, we kicked him out and built our own country. He was still the same tyrant after all his troops left Colonial soil so — It’s not the same thing as a coup.

Yet there is a very real danger that we might replace their tyranny with our own. I see it even here because there are people that if they were ranting in German with a little toothbrush moustache under their noses and holding their right arm rigidly at a 45 degree angle — it would scare the crap out of you. Or should.

The lesson is that you do not want to become the same sort of thing your enemy is just to replace him with the same sort of miseries he created.

One glaring instance of “not stooping to their level” is … Would you consider it perfectly OK to steal elections by a combination of crimes and tactics that put your guy in power and devastated the population’s trust in the political system just so you could win? Isn’t that a short term gain that will eventually come back around and bite you hard on the ass? Is it “ego talking” to condemn stooping to that level?

I can’t speak for Bill but I think what he meant by “stooping to their level” was using the pop culture to our advantage, recognizing/amplifying/exploiting the other side’s mistakes, wielding power when we have it instead of acting like a doormat for our political adversaries and things like that.

Those things are not stooping to their level, they’re just common sense tactics. Patton did not stoop to Rommel’s level by using his tanks against German tanks. The Allies didn’t stoop to the Axis’ level when we invaded Italy and France. You have to fight force with counterforce but that doesn’t mean that you have to stoop to the level of Nazis and for all practical purposes become Nazis to defeat Nazis.

So if you’re going to say something like Bill did, you need to be very careful how you put it. While you’re not responsible for other people’s selective hearing you are responsible, if you want to win, for not doing things that keep you from winning too.

In fact, I would argue that Bill put it exactly the wrong way. A better way to say it would be that we need to use their own tactics against our political foes. That doesn’t mean we need to stoop to our foes level and use their tactics ourselves. It’s not the same thing. We used our superior M1 Garands against German Mausers but we didn’t build industrial extermination camps, starve POWs and use Jews and other ‘undesirables’ for slave labor in war factories.

Contrast the fact that while our men were fighting that war many of our women were hard at work, voluntarily, in our arms production factories and being well paid. Our POW camps were humain and treated prisoners with the dignity we would want for ourselves if the situation were reversed. Germany was our enemy but we didn’t round up every German American and send them to the ovens. Even the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII didn’t stoop to the level of the Nazis. Those people were not beaten, starved, medically experimented on and exterminated even if their treatment was racist as hell and as wrong as we’ve ever been. That’s just not who we are. If you see the differences you see what I mean, we don’t want to be Nazis to beat Nazis.

We have a huge recent example of what I’m talking about. Harry Reid implemented his ‘nuclear option’ to cheat by changing the rules to favor his side because he didn’t have enough partisan support in the Senate to meet the 60 votes required for judicial nominations — Senate Republicans turned that against his party and appointed 3 Conservative Supreme Court Justices. Which overturned Roe v. Wade.

Here’s something you might not know. Reid’s “nuclear option” specifically didn’t apply to nominations to the Supreme Court. Ol’ Harry knew that was a pitfall and tried to plug that hole. Sly bastard. He tried to have his cake and eat it too. He did that over the objections his opposition raised to changing a long standing workable compromise. He refused to compromise when he had the power to refuse and this short sightedness came back to bite his party hard.

Had he not embarked on a course of trying to change the rules to suit himself we would today very likely have less conservative SCOTUS judges because the ones we got under Trump definitely would not have met the 60 vote criteria that Harry Reid destroyed.

We didn’t cheat, we simply refused to allow the other side to stack the deck in a manner that could and would only ever advantage themselves. Sauce for the goose.

We could have cheated in exactly the same manner the Democrat Left is now threatening to. Trump could have appointed 50 SCOTUS judges if he could get the Senate to go along with that scheme. We didn’t stoop to their level. Like an old friend of mine accused me of, he said I was crazy but never more than just as crazy as I had to be.

I see this in other situations too, it’s not just Bill and I’m not singling him out for criticism. Michael Knowles was I think the pundit that came up with “Today’s conspiracy theories become facts 6 months from now.”

There are a lot of conspiracy theories, not all of them are Leftist propaganda but that doesn’t stop the Left from painting us all as a bunch of cooky right wingnuts.

Knowles did not mean to justify those sorts of conspiracies. He was not saying that in 6 months the world will be proven to be flat, that the electric universe would be scientifically accepted, that Nazis built and are planning world domination from a secret base in Antarctica, that lizard people secretly have infiltrated all our institutions of power, that 911 was a U.S. Government false flag operation, that human beings from the United States of America never walked on the moon … Or any other nonsense of the sort.

Yet there are a lot of people on ‘the right’ who believe that sort of thing most sincerely and when Knowles said that, that’s what they heard.

The problem is that people hear what they want to hear. It doesn’t matter if you qualify this sort of thing with specifics. They will ignore those specifics thinking “well he was really supporting my beliefs he just can’t come right out and say so” or simply ignoring your specifics entirely with no further justification at all.

This is why it’s important to be mindful of what you say and how you say it. This is why I can’t get this sort of complex idea across in a 256 character tweet or a couple short paragraphs on a comment board.

If we want to win this and not just replace one insanity for another we must look to the horizon and see the shore we’re sailing towards. There are some pretty serious reefs between here and there.