WHAT PART OF "IMPOSSIBLE, RIDICULOUS AND MORALLY REPREHENSIBLE" DID THEY NOT UNDERSTAND?

Recently my friend PrismWarden and I had stimulating and frustrating comments conversation over at the "interesting" blog Pizza Poems. Renata, the blogger there, has a rather gloomy view of the United States, democracy, and capitalism. Most of it rooted in her personal failure to achieve the American Dream, which she believes is a fraud - a carrot on a stick to trick people into immigrating here. Renata is an immigrant from Romania, now a naturalized citizen.

David Gelernter's commentary: Adrift In A Sea Of Phoniness in the LA Times reminded me very much of that conversation. Gerlernter says: "American political discourse -- especially on the left -- has abandoned logic, reason and honesty for a pack of nasty lies." How true. No matter what PrismWarden and I argued, invariably Renata (and her "allied" readers) would come back at us as if we had said the exact opposite. Leftists/liberals cannot win arguments based on fact, or reason, or logic. They must keep the conversation muddled and obfuscated, with the ultimate goal of frustrating their debate partner into quitting. I hate to admit it, but it works.

Ann Coulter definitely understood this frustration when she said: "I think a baseball bat is the most effective way these days" to talk to liberals.

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And on a similar note, Thomas Sowell wrote a good column called "The Left's Vocabulary" about how the left seeks to control or stifle debate by using "...its verbal talents to change the whole meaning of words and to substitute new words, so that issues would be debated in terms of their redefined vocabulary, instead of the real substance of the issues. Words which have acquired connotations from the actual experiences of millions of human beings over generations, or even centuries, have been replaced by new words that wipe out those connotations and substitute more fashionable notions of the left."