Letters to the Editor
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Here I am, tear me apart.
What liberals don't realize is that many of these right-wing pundits are not scholars or authors who are trying to have a reasonable discussion about issues. They're like chess masters. They know the opening, the middle game, the end game. They are not there for a friendly discussion; they are there to win. And not just to win but to vanquish with scorched-earth ruthlessness. For every move you make they have a pre-planned, pre-studied counter-move. For every statistic you have they have 20 statistics, all memorized, and it would take you a month just to figure out where all their statistics came from. They know all your arguments before you even open your mouth. And they have a hundred pre-packaged refutations for anything you might say.
It's time for liberals to understand what's going on. There is a culture war. It's just that we don't act like it. When some poor liberal goes up against O'Beirne it's like a minimum-wage security guard with a nightstick going up against a Navy SEAL with a submachine gun. The author of this article says that when Kate O'Beirne came up against a former head of NARAL that "it was a bloodbath." No shit it was a blood bath. That's what O'Bierne DOES. That's what she trains for.
When these "discussions" happen in a public venue it makes the liberal look dumb and inept. What we have to realize is that these things are not discussions. They are combat. The conservative hit-person is not there to discuss. He or she is there to kill you and mount your scalp on a hundred right-wing blogs. Here's what the American Enterprise Institute said about the match-up:
"Watching the Kate vs. Kate debate on Meet the Press this past Sunday--it was our own Kate O’Beirne vs. Kate Michelman, formerly of NARAL Pro-Choice America--how out-of-date the latter's rhetoric seemed, how diffuse and filibustering her language was, over against the precision, citation of telling facts, and self-confident argument of Kate O'Beirne."
http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.23678/pub_detail.asp
Bloodbath indeed. The tragedy is that we liberals participate in it, we run to it. The early Christians at least had to be *thrown* to the lions. We liberals walk into the lions -- "here I am, rip me to shreads." If you're going to confront the lions you need to be a lion. And where are the liberal lions?