Today, my hometown paper ran the stupidiest column (Cal Thomas) I ever read. Here's the article:
http://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/news/editorial/9546929.htm"Why Do Liberals Hate Bush So Vehemently?"
Summary: Because he has convictions and liberals have none. He cut taxs, proving that liberals aren't necessary to solve people's problems (HUH?), and he believes in God (liberals of course don't, because they don't believe in anything--see point one).
And here's my rebuttal in progress. Feel free to comment on grammar, wording or evidence. Thank you.
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So Cal Thomas thinks that liberals hate Bush because Bush is a man of convictions and he believes in God. Liberals on the other hand believe in nothing so they can be more French.
In this perfect example of the “straw man” fallacy, Thomas refutes an easy fake argument rather than dealing with the true argument his opponents actually hold.
Liberals do have beliefs—that democracy is founded on free and fair elections is one That means everybody gets to vote, not just the lucky few unpurged from Jeb Bush’s voter rolls in Florida. That means a fair recount as mandated by law instead of a partisan U. S. Supreme Court decision to stop it.
Liberals believe that some problems are so big that only big government can effectively combat them. Widespread poverty among retirees for example has been virtually eliminated by Social Security, a program that Alan Greenspan warns is now running out of funds. Liberals, who created the program, want to strengthen Social Security. Bush and his conservatives, who hate it, want to “privatize” it.
Contrary to the wild ranting on the other side, many if not most liberals believe in God. They just don’t believe they can read the ineffable mind of the Creator on issues like stem-cell research or Jews occupying Jerusalem. For that, they rely on the brains that the good Lord gave them.
Liberals believe that democracy means giving everybody an equal chance. Mr. Bush’s democracy means handing out no-bid government contracts to special interests such as Vice President Cheney’s former employer Halliburton and turning a blind eye to corporate crime like that cooked up by long-time Bush crony Ken Lay of Enron.
Cal Thomas is right that liberals hate Bush’s tax breaks for the rich. That policy more than any other has increased the number of poor by over one and a half million people for three straight years, turned a historic budget surplus into a historic budget deficit, and sent the Dow Jones index down nearly 20 percent since March of 2001. Not since Herbert Hoover will America have lost a million net jobs at the end of a president’s term.
But what really angers liberals is Mr. Bush’s lying about the invasion and occupation of Iraq: no weapons of mass destruction found, no ties to terrorism shown, no democracy established. In a few more days, over a thousand American soldiers will have died in Iraq and not a single claim Bush made for going to war has been proven correct.
Even the estimates of the costs of the war (“a few billion,” said defense official Paul Wolfowitz “paid for by Iraqi oil revenue”) were wildly off—-costs are climbing into the hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money with no end in sight.
No, Mr. Thomas, liberals don’t hate Bush because they want to be more French, they hate his policies because they want America to be more American again.
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