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• Wednesday, May 2, 2007 07:47 PM

  Dead-enders

  For a while during the Bush years I compulsively visited conservative websites like townhall.com to argue with the crazies there. Somehow, given the political landscape of the country in those days, I felt that sitting around in a left-leaning forum like salon and congratulating my fellow lefties on how right they were and how bad the Bushies were was a form of sticking my head in the sand. It seemed then that engaging the crazies head-on was the only way for me to participate in the national debate—after all, these were the guys who controlled the media and seemed to have the American public marching in lock-step with them.

  Times have changed. Anyone who reads Glenn Greenwald knows that the hardcore Right's hold on the public is diminishing as we speak. And while reading the banter on this forum is entertaining, I no longer feel the itch to respond to the crazies. Before I was lashing out against them from a position of weakness, but now they are the weak ones, and their childish, jingoist distortions of reality no longer hold sway. Sure, they aren't beaten yet, but every time they open their mouths with another mind-numbingly inaccurate portrayal of the world—of their enemies, foreign and domestic, the nature of a piece of legislation, the situation in Iraq—they dig themselves deeper in their hole and make it ever clearer that they live in an alternate universe. All of their distortions have been shown false over and over again, and nothing we say will convince them of anything. Why bother? For the fun of it, I suppose, but isn't it more fun, now that we have the luxury of doing so, to dismiss them like the ants they are? There are real arguments to be had and real battles to be waged in this country now. Why bother arguing with a bunch of dead-enders? Why, as Harry Reid pointed out, get into a name-calling match with someone with a 9-percent approval rating?

  Rick

  —Rictor-Rictrola Read Rictor-Rictrola's other letters
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