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12/16/2004: "What You Get from Talking to a Dittohead about the Environment"

Here’s the short answer: personal satisfaction at best. That’s why we counseled in the earlier blog to go immediately for the kill. By taking your best shots upfront, you can then agree to disagree with your Dittohead opponent and move on to another topic. The sad fact is that it is hopeless to talk to a Dittohead about the Environment and Global Warming. Just look at tax policy. They’re cutting taxes and ending up with huge deficits, yet they still deny the connection. (A case in point is Rush on deficits: “the only way to get rid of a deficit is to cut taxes and grow out of it. Every time we've tried that it's happened.”) Every American should have figured out from day-to-day experience that when you spend more than you take in you go into debt. How then are Dittoheads going to admit to environmental degradation and global warming when they don’t even admit that their tax cuts have caused trillions in debt? They’re just not going to get it. Another case in point – Rush on the environment: “if a bird could grab a shotgun and fire back at us, it would, folks. Never forget that.” That, folks, is the very picture of denial. The reason they’re not going to get what you have to say is that their positions are fundamentally based on greed, and greed is about as powerful a motivator as you get. They’re on very good terms with greed, and heartily agree with Gordon Gekko that “greed is good, greed works.” There are always jobs to be gained from raping the land and they are unwilling to constrain any source of wealth. Put another way, an environmental point of view requires that immediate, easy economic gain be tempered by the moral issue of respect for future generations, and we all know how Dittoheads feel about moral issues! The only use they have for “morality” is as an excuse for giving right wing constituencies the power to criminalize non-adherence to their sect’s religious beliefs. That has as much to do with morality as the invasion of Iraq had to do with the War on Terrorism. So view your discussion with Dittohead about the environment as an opportunity to get something off your chest, slightly more effective than talking to a mirror, but don’t spend too much time on it or people will start looking at you funny!