Does this ever happen to you? You’re having an argument with someone when they accuse you of a certain behavior, and you respond, “Are you kidding? I was just going to say the same thing about you!”
Apparently, the criterion by which we judge others is not always applied to ourselves. This happens to me a lot when I discuss politics with people who are firmly entrenched conservatives.
They consistently accuse liberals of: 1) Lying, 2) Being afraid of facts, 3) Putting blame elsewhere.
Are you kidding? I was just….
My study here is anecdotal, but I observe this often enough to have drawn some conclusions that I stand behind. I suggest this: Conservatives are brilliant in a debate. Their polished and refined strategy is: If you take away your opponents strength by calling it your own, they have nowhere to go.
A Republican friend who likes to periodically goad me into a debate, came up to me the other day and said, “Liberals can’t stand facts!”
He went on to give me some “Facts.”
“Did you know,” he asked, “that the average unemployment rate under Bush was 5.3? Obama’s is over 8.”
He went on: “Bush increased the debt over two terms by 5 trillion while Obama increased the debt by more in less than half the time.”
I read Republican and conservative websites, and will tune into Fox News periodically to calibrate my perspective and so I’ve heard these numbers before. I responded: “Those are real numbers and I guess you could call them ‘facts,’ but they 
do not tell the truth. Truth requires analysis and your conclusions from those numbers are as relevant as saying, ‘When I’m in a room with Bill Gates we have over 70 billion dollars between us.’ It’s true, but it doesn’t tell the true story.”
Laughter follows, but I argue enough that I’m more or less prepared.
“Bush inherited a robust economy with unemployment at 4 and handed off 8 with a bottomless recession right at the tail end of his presidency. This month it is at 5.8. Most of President Obama’s debt is from continued policies. President Bush decreased revenue and then borrowed to pay for two wars and a prescription drug program. Plus war costs rise as they continue.”
Like I said, this wasn’t my first rodeo and so I transitioned into my rote rant: “President Reagan still retains his crown as the Great Tax Emancipator, but the bill came due for his policies when George Bush, Sr. became president and tanked that presidency. Same thing happened here, except that it wasn’t a minor recession; it was the worst in 80 years.”
My friend’s eyes are now rolling because he’s heard this before and he knows that he’s going to pull out the trump card soon.
I continued: “Recessions don’t immediately reverse when new presidents take office and the quagmire of continuing job loss, increased unemployment benefits, necessary stimulus to stop the bleeding, resulted in trillions in new debt. That’s the truth beyond your easy to sell ‘facts’.”
And, right on cue, he pulled out the card: “All you Democrats can do is blame the past and Bush.”
“I didn’t know that there was a statute of limitations on truth.” I fired back. “Maybe we 
should get over blaming Booth for assassinating Lincoln. The truth is what it is. A recession was caused by predatory lending in an unsupervised market with unscrupulous toxic assets and rising economic inequality. We can argue all day about who is complicit, but we can be sure that it all happened before January of 2009.”
“I love you Kroeger,” was his sincere, but nevertheless dismissive, response. We are good friends and we enjoy poking each other with argumentative sticks, but I felt that I’d “won” this little strategy debate and so did he.
My conclusion was, as it has been before, that “facts” are meaningless without analysis that goes deeper than simply offering evidence to support an already drawn conclusion. And, my conclusion was, as it has been before….one side is less likely to go that deep than the other.
Were you just about to say that about me?
