MayerBlog: The Web Log of
|
|
|
Ad Hominem
Ad hominem is a Latin phrase used to identify a certain type of argument, one that attacks an opponent’s character rather than answering the substance of his argument. In the context of rational discourse, ad hominem arguments usually are frowned upon – and rightly so – for they generally indicate a kind of intellectual laziness, a willingness to resort to cheap rhetorical tricks, appealing to emotions rather than reason, to avoid discussion of ideas on their merits. But there are some people who are in the news – in the worlds of politics or popular culture – who are so despicable and/or superficial as to be living caricatures of themselves or other human beings. In criticizing these people, their values and their actions, I have no shame in resorting to ad hominem arguments – for they deserve nothing better.
n Mahmoud Ahmadinejad The president of Iran, who would defy the world in developing nuclear weapons, an anti-Semite who would like to destroy Israel and who doesn’t believe the Holocaust happened, a terrorist thug who supported the Islamic revolutionaries who held Americans hostage in the late 1970s and who continues to support radical Islamist terrorists today, and a tyrant who has banned Western music from Iranian state radio. He looks like a sloppy graduate student, with an unkempt beard and wearing a sports coat with no tie. Is it too much to ask a head of state to shave and to put on a necktie?
n The “Reverend” Fred Phelps This leader of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas is probably the most hate-filled man in America today. His followers picket funerals – first they picketed the funerals of homosexuals, and now they picket military funerals – holding signs with such messages as “God Hates Fags,” “God Hates Fag Enablers,” and “Thank God for IEDs” (a reference to the improvised explosive devices that have killed U.S. troops in Iraq). Phelps and his followers say God is punishing America for tolerating gay people – “It’s God’s wrath” on “a depraved nation,” Phelps says – and has vowed to challenge the new laws passed by many states, in response to his group’s activities, that ban protests near funerals. When considering a man who is so consumed by his homophobia – so obviously obsessed by his loathing for people who love other people of the same sex – one cannot help but wonder if he “doth protest too much” as a result of repressed self-loathing?
n The NEA The nation’s largest teachers’ union, the 2.8-million-member National Education Association, is largely responsible for the greatest rip-off of taxpayers’ money in America today: the bloated, inefficient, ineffective public elementary and secondary school system that has failed to give millions of American children an adequate education. Although I do not fault the many dedicated teachers who comprise the rank-and-file of the NEA – men and women who are forced to join a union whose left-wing politics they do not support – I do hold responsible the leadership of the organization and its active supporters, who stand as the single greatest impediment to educational reform in America, through their opposition to charter schools, vouchers, home schooling, etc. – any and all proposals that would give parents and their kids a real choice in education, and offer real competition to failed public schools. The recent announcement that the NEA is entering into a partnership with the AFL-CIO – a partnership, though falling short of full merger, that will allow local NEA affiliates to join the AFL-CIO – starkly reveals the NEA for what it really is: not an “education association” but a labor union, pure and simple, which like all other labor unions, uses its “muscle” to shield its incompetent members and to push a variety of left-wing political policies.
n AARP If there’s any organization in America today that is even more evil than the NEA, it’s the AARP: the association of “retired persons” (“retarded pricks” is more like it, for one truly has to be either an idiot or a recklessly naïve person to join) that stands as the greatest obstacle to real reform in Social Security and Medicare, the massive federal “entitlement” programs that will soon bankrupt America. In my Feb. 15, 2005 essay “Socialist Insecurity,” I explained why the Social Security program is, quite literally, a “socialist, insecure, shitty” program. As I noted there, it’s quite telling that even the left-liberal Al Neuharth, founder of USA Today, in a Jan. 7, 2005 editorial in his paper denounced the AARP’s leadership for “abuse of power,” in their scaremongering ad campaign against President Bush’s modest proposal for Social Security reform. The AARP did endorse Bush’s proposal to add prescription-drug coverage to Medicare, no doubt because they saw it as an opportunity to expand the federal “welfare state”; and the organization since has joined leftist critics of the program who want to expand it even further. In their defense, the AARP leadership claims to act on behalf of the interests of the senior citizens who comprise their membership, but does it really further the interest of seniors to actively support programs that deny Americans economic freedom and that (despite the myth that they’re “insurance” programs) really amount to transferring wealth from one group to another (from young workers who earn the wealth and then pay taxes on it, to provide “benefits” to retirees who receive them simply because they exist)? In other words, is it really in the interest of seniors to screw their children and grandchildren?
n Hillary Rodham Clinton The Democrats’ great hope for 2008, she’s a power-hungry bitch who has ruthlessly exploited her marriage to Bill “Slick Willy” Clinton to get into the Arkansas executive mansion, the White House, the U.S. Capitol, and now is trying to get back into the White House (this time, the Oval Office!) She’s “The Great Bitch” – the nickname that the people of England gave to Henry VIII’s despised second wife, Anne Boleyn, whom Hillary resembles, except that Anne sought only to marry the king while Hillary seeks to be the king.
n John McCain The so-called “straight-talking” U.S. Senator who’s really anything but, he’s Big Media’s favorite Republican (which means he’s a RINO, a Republican In Name Only), an unprincipled megalomaniac who, among other things, wants to destroy freedom of political speech in the United States. He reminds me of Humphrey Bogart’s character, Captain Queeg, in the film Caine Mutiny, in the climactic scene where Queeg has a nervous breakdown on the witness stand, ranting about missing frozen strawberries while he fondles ball bearings in the palm of his hand. The difference is that, in McCain’s mutiny against American constitutional principles, it’s not frozen strawberries but rather “campaign finance reform,” “national security,” “deficit reduction,” and other euphemisms for the pet projects over which he obsesses; and it’s not ball bearings that he wants to hold in his hands, but rather the lives and freedoms of American citizens.
n Teddy Kennedy This political dinosaur epitomizes the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of modern American left-liberalism. His recent performance during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the confirmation of Judge (now Justice) Samuel Alito shows how pathetic a creature “Old Kennedy” has become. As R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. aptly noted in the current issue of Tyrrell’s American Spectator magazine, “Anyone who watched him during [the hearings] . . . must have gleaned that Teddy had hardly a clue as to what he was doing. His set speeches were written for him by brainy staff members who will soon move on to Washington law firms or lobbying outfits. . . . Thundering and blubbering during the Senate Judiciary Committee’s grilling of the bemused nominee, Teddy stumbled over questions that were supposed to reveal dreadful revelations about the Judge.” Of course, Teddy is in no position to pontificate on matters of morality or ethics: Were it not for his magic last name, and the political clout his family has in Massachusetts, he would have been prosecuted for manslaughter many years ago, when he was drunk and drove his car over a bridge in Chappaquiddick, killing his passenger, a young woman named Mary Jo Kopechne. Democrat jackasses keep ignoring this dark spot on Kennedy’s resume, but Republican elephants will never forget it. A favorite GOP bumper sticker, following Vice President Dick Cheney’s accidental shooting of a hunting companion last month, read: “I’d rather go hunting with Dick than riding with Teddy.”
n George Clooney An actor who’s vastly overrated in both his looks and his talent, he’s one of those obnoxious Hollywood left-wing Democrats who can’t resist making snide political remarks. One of his most outrageous recent comments was his off-color “joke” about lobbyist Jack Abramoff – a comment about the man’s first name and last syllable of his last name – during the Golden Globes awards show in January. Abramoff’s father, Frank, who didn’t find the comment at all funny, wrote an angry letter to the Palm Springs, Calif. Desert Sun decrying Clooney’s “glib and ridiculous attack” on his son that reduced his granddaughter to tears. Clooney, though, was not sorry: “I make no apologies for that – it was a joke,” he told CNN’s Larry King. Well, George, it wasn’t a joke – it was not funny and it was in extremely poor taste – and you’re an obnoxious asshole who brings shame to the Clooney family name.
n Barbra Streisand, Rosie O’Donnell, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, the Dixie Chicks, et al. No one who’s not a foaming-at-the-mouth, Bush-bashing, left-wing Democrat cares one whit about the inane (and witless) political views of these tiresome celebrities. They should just do what the apt title of Laura Ingraham’s 2003 book suggests: “Shut Up & Sing” (or otherwise try to entertain us).
n Michael Moore This so-called “filmmaker” is really nothing more than the maker of hackneyed propaganda pieces that distort facts, defame individuals (such as former General Motors chairman Roger Smith, former NRA president Charlton Heston, and President Bush), and denigrate capitalism and American values. The fat man in a baseball cap who claims to speak for working-class America, Moore has built his career on lies and hypocrisy. (In her book, Laura Ingraham nicely sums up Moore as someone “who poses as a down-to-earth everyman who’s for the Middle American working guy but is really a nasty, egomaniacal hypocrite who makes his fortune from the very fat cats he purports to despise.”) Moore did not grow up in the Rust Belt factory town of Flint, Michigan, as he claims, but rather grew up in Davison, Michigan, a lily-white, upper-middle-class town east of Flint (I should know because Mike and I debated in high school, for rival schools). He has a $1.27 million apartment in Manhattan, sends his daughter to a private school, and also has also built a beautiful home in Central Lake, an exclusive community in northern Michigan. He bashes corporations (particularly oil and defense contractors, whom he denounces as war profiteers) and he loudly supports labor unions; yet his foundation earns income from a stock portfolio that includes Boeing, Honeywell, and even Halliburton, and he does his postproduction film work in Canada to avoid paying union wages in the U.S. (as Peter Schweizer has documented in his book Do as I Say (Not as I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy (2005)).
n John Edward and James Van Praag These frauds – and all others who, like them, claim to “talk with the dead” – are the vilest sort of con artists in modern society. As magicians Penn & Teller revealed in the premiere episode of their Showtime series Bullshit!, these modern-day “spiritualists” use the same old tricks that Harry Houdini debunked a century ago. What makes their fraudulent claims so despicable is that they prey on the bereaved: cashing in on their victims’ grief, giving them “comfort” by distorting reality with their “bullshit superstitions,” as Penn Jillette so aptly characterized them.
| Link to this Entry | Posted Thursday, March 9, 2006 | Copyright © David N. Mayer |
|