What to Say When

 

Watching Katie Porter (D-CA) during a hearing in the House of Representatives, when a witness (Lindsey Burke, of the Heritage Foundation)  testifying before the Committee inveighed against Congress "spending other people's money," Rep. Porter made the simple, but devastating observation that the job of Congress is, in fact, to spend other people's money, namely taxpayer money, and if Congress refused to do this job we would "zero out all spending for the Defense Department." And turning to the witness, she asked, "Is that what you want?"

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/3c-qT2wZ9CY

This is just one example of someone who has heard a simple, telegraphic prop, a synecdoche really, where a short hand phrase stands in for a whole, longer argument, and who explodes into a longer, more detailed deconstruction of what that, by logical extension, would actually mean.

So, the Heritage Foundation would like us all to believe that taxation is really government imposed theft, taxes being robbed from citizens, and thus are, ipso facto, illegitimate and taxes should not be collected, because doing so is the crime of theft. 

Of course, as Porter explains, without taxes, without a source of revenue, there can be no government, which the Heritage Foundation would possibly like, but then, even the Heritage Foundation realizes there are some things the government does even the most ardent Republican, libertarian likes: armed forces. 

Built into the macho proponents of strong men, violent men of iron will, is the love of guns and armed forces.

So Porter demolishes that empty phrase: "You are spending other people's money," with the riposte: "Of course we are spending other people's money, and other people want us to spend their money to provide for their defense, and likely, for a variety of other things."

Another phrase adored by people like Marjorie Taylor Green and other gun worshipers is, "If you make guns illegal, only the bad guys will have guns." Or, the spin off, "The best way to deal with a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun!"

To this, Dominic Erdozain ("One Nation Under Guns") replies: The good guy with a gun is always good, until he becomes a bad guy with a gun.

In fact, as he asserts, citing a welter of gun death statistics, the vast majority of gun deaths, in particular mass shootings, are committed by people who, until they unsheathed a gun, were thought to be good guys--no criminal record, no actionable history to deny or question their right to gun ownership.

But what Erdozain is saying is people who own guns are the people who kill other people with guns. He cites statistics which suggest a very common murder scenario is fathers who shoot to death their own sons. 

Who knew? 

Actual good person with gun

My real point is here, if we know or can identify an argument which is really, at heart, stupid, we can torpedo that particular piece of stupidity if we are prepared. Otherwise, the moment passes and we are left sputtering.

Congressmen like Jamie Raskin seem particularly adept and prepared to blow Ms. Greene out of the water, likely because they have heard it all before. When MGT tells Raskin she will not answer his "stupid questions" he rejoins with, "Well, will you answer my intelligent questions? Or my devastating questions?"

What we Democrats really need is a playbook, a hymnal, filled with Republican tropes, so we can develop our own tropes, prepared in advance, to sink those Republican vessels.