Antidote to Liberal Looney-Tunes

Need an antidote to the liberal loony-tunes bedeviling your otherwise sensible life? How do you respond when they call Bush a tyrant, refer to the Republicans as Nazis, and distort the drive for freedom and human rights as a crass grab for oil? Read "On Experiencing Gore Vidal" by William F. Buckley Jr for a few hints and rhetorical strategies.

It seems to me that the discussion engaged in by Mr. Vidal and Mr. Buckley are the same kinds of discussions occurring today. Disagreement leads to distortion leads to name-calling. Gore Vidal is an inveterate liar and cannot be compared to the vast majority of liberals who are honest, decent people with whom we have honest disagreements. We can engage in honest, open discussions with the vast majority of liberals and if no common ground can be reached, we can certainly agree to disagree without be disagreeable.

It is the small minority of loony-tune liberals to whom I refer. The same accusations of police state shenanigans, Nazi leanings, and fascist tendencies are bandied about by the loony-tune left. By engaging in such rhetorical strategies they have cut themselves off from honest debate. Their claims ignore reality and require the listener to accept the horrible fantasy world of 1984 as a distinct possibility. Those with less than normal self-restraint on the Left are still claiming that Republicans and the Right would like nothing more than to bring back slavery, open up the death camps, and throw widows and orphans into the street. Mr. Buckley writes, referring to the violence at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, 1968:

The point is that [some] policemen violate their obligations just the way [some] politicians do. If we could all work up an equal sweat and if you all would be obliging enough to have your cameras handy every time a politicians commits demagogy or a businessman passes along graft or bribes, or every time a labor union [man] beats up people who refuse to join his union--then maybe we could work up some kind of impartiality in resentment. AS of this moment, I say: go after those cops who were guilty of unnecessary brutality, [and] develop your doctrine of security sufficiently so that [you can know[ when you don't have as many cops as you should have had... But don't do what's happening in Chicago tonight, which is to infer from individual and despicable acts of violence, a case for implicit totalitarianism in the American system.

Mr. Buckley shows the possibility criticism that looks beyond partisan loyalty and towards more general ideas of justice and right. Buckley's response to being called a crypto-Nazi by Gore Vidal,

One wonders how the editor of Commentary would have reacted if he had been called a crypto Nazi in the presence of a dozen million people. Would he take the position that that was merely a political charge, in a response to which one has no reason to lose one's cool? If, in a non-academic circumstances, you call a man a Nazi, are you evoking ethnocentric nationalism--or Buchenwald?

Buckley asks whether "the rhetorical totalism of the present day has etiolated every epithet?" When faced with a comparison to monsters who killed millions of people can we maintain any sense of indignity? Buckley continues

I do not believe that anyone thought me a Nazi because Vidal called me one, but I do believe that everyone who heard him call me one without a sense of shock, without experiencing anger, thinks more tolerantly about Nazism than once he did, than even now he should.

If Liberal so easily refer to President Bush and the Republican administration as Nazis and followers of Nazism, do they not take the Holocaust and ethnocentric nationalism that seriously?