I feel a rant coming on.

The rant du jour: B is for Bullshit.

I haven't ranted about politics in a long time, but I have been stewing this one up all day. It's the way conservatives don't argue from facts, but from pundit opinion. I posted a link on KR to this An Evening with Ann Coulter from Al Franken's site, found via Huffington Post. One response was "Franken lies too," and I asked this individual to prove it. She came back with links to rightwing blogs and opinions of bloviating bloggers. Her big Ah-HAH Gotcha link claimed the Clinton Administration never warned the Bush Administration about the threat from al Qaeda, and that Franken's writing on this subject was a lie! Gotcha!

The problem is, the guy she was citing was lying. I knew this claim was false, because I do follow the news, and it took me about 40 seconds of Google time to link to Bush Adminstration's First Memo on al-Qaeda Declassified. In which it says the Clinton Administration put together a plan in 2000 and passed it along to the incoming administration. Note, this isn't a blogger opinion, it cites to source documents, testimony, all that really facty stuff.

And I realized that this is what pisses me off most, and what we need to bitchslap every time it happens - conservatives don't argue from facts, they argue from what they believe/wish/want to be facts. And I'm sorry, we are in the goddamn mess we are in right now because half the population got bamboozled (but are now waking up, thank GOD!) and because we've been too polite to yell "Bullshit" when we see it. It won't do any good with the Base, because when confronted with facts they put their hands over their ears and shriek, "Clinton got a blowjob!" over and over, to remind them that they are the party that was going to bring honor back to the White House. This must be a very trying time for them, as the Bush Administration is in a meltdown even Al Franken couldn't have conceived when he was writing one of those humor pieces that aren't meant to be taken seriously except by wingnut bloggers who are then cited as sources of proof.

So that's my rant. We cannot, for the sake of politeness, accept bullshit as an alternative point of view. There are documented facts, they are different from opinions. This politeness toward conservative idiocy is killing our planet, literally. People have to be really tuned in to know about global warming, and they don't get it from our mainstream media, because the conservatives have done this really slick mind game on them. A scientist who says the polar ice caps are melting at a very alarming pace and picking up speed, and has the evidence to show how it's happening, must be "balanced" on the news by a BushCo Ho who simply says, "We don't believe it," without a shred of supporting evidence. That's "balanced reporting." That's bullshit.

I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to be polite and pretend that this rightwing bullshit is the equivalent of discussing facts, and I'm going to slap it down when I see it happening, even when everybody in the thread is agreeing to disagree. I'll agree to disagree and be polite when you post a picture of tacky knitting, but I won't politely accept opinion as fact and lies as truth. Because we've been nice for too long and it's killing us.