Harry Reid: I'm Such a Capable, Intelligent Legislator, I'm Delegating My Public-Advocacy Duties to This Here 11-Year-Old Kid

Michelle Malkin notes this is another example of Democrats hiding behind "kiddie shields."

I have a different point. Liberals are forever congratulating themselves on how nuanced and complex their thinking is. Every time they fail in the marketplace of ideas, they excuse their failure by noting that they are engaging in lofty, arcane reasoning, and that their dreaded foes only won the debate because they trafficked in thuggishly simpleminded sloganeering.

Always.

Fail at talk radio? Ah well, that is easily explained: our arguments are so gosh-darn elevated and eldritch they fly over the heads of the lumpenproletariat.

This has always been a pretty stupid claim. The liberal argument is easily grasped by children, because it rarely includes the ideas of costs or tradeoffs. That's why children and teenagers tend to be liberal in their thinking. Do you want to feed the hungry? Clothe the naked? Heal the sick? Boy do I!!! These are very simplistic propositions, and furthermore come from a place of pure emotion -- empathy. Their is little intellectual thrust behind these impulses. And certainly there is none of the higher-order mathematical-type thinking involved in cost-benefit analysis ad risk management and moral hazard and unintended consequences and the free-rider problem and so on.

But their claims of complex, nuanced intellectual appeals are most spectactularly self-refuted when they trot out -- as they are wont to do -- children to repeat the exact same arguments they make. Children. Look, children are wonderful and all, but if you're rating their intellects, they're basically retards. You know, we measure retardation by noting what age intellectual development is arrested at; an 11-year-old is just lovely and pure and all of that, but if we're speaking of an adult with an 11-year-old's mental facilities, we're talking about a retard.

So these hyperintellectual liberals, whose primary intellectual limitation consists (in their own telling) of not being able to tame their wide-ranging brilliance enough to communicate effectively with their mental inferiors, find that 11-year-olds (retards, in adult terms) are able to make all the same highly nuanced and recursive arguments they do, and more effectively, too.

So: Democratic arguments are so complicated and nuanced that retards can comprehend and regurgitate them on command.

Or, I guess they might explain: Hey, we're too damn brilliant to speak down the level of 90% of the public so look, we've got these undersized retards to do it for us. Set a retard to catch a retard.

Whatever. 90% of the time I hear liberals are so scary-smart they fail only because I am too fucking stupid to comprehend what they're telling me and then 10% of the time they have a kid take a break from learning shapes and colors to parrot their arguments to me.

posted by Ace at 02:30 PM

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