VIC FERRARI - THE STUPIDEST MAN ALIVE

It is said that you cannot win an argument with an idiot. They drag you down to their level, and then beat you with experience. That may well be true, but if you can get the idiot to pick up his own armed grenade, all you have to worry about is getting blood on your shoes.

Tonight, Vic Ferrari proved beyond a shadow of a lingering doubt that he is indeed the stupidest man in PalTalk. Now, there are people who can't form a coherent sentence, like Ds_F_Ps_AndA-Holes, and there are people who inhabit a strange twilight dimension beyond human understanding, like JesSeado, but if there were an Olympic event for poor arguments, Vic would have taken gold, silver, and bronze tonight.

Vic, like many ignorant wingnuts, has fully absorbed the GOP talking point that causes every right wing crazy, from Ken Mehlman on down, to spew the following, "The Democrats have no plan. All they can do is criticize Bush!" This is usually spat out with all the aplomb of a 3rd grader, after which they usually stick out their tongue and try to rub gum in your hair. Charming.

I hear this meme a lot from Vic, and just tonight I finally figured out what was so fallacious. "Vic," I calmly inquired, "You do realize that it's fairly well known that reelections are frequently a referendum on the performance of the incumbent, right? Showing people that they've been badly served by a leader is perfectly normal." Vic immediately began haranguing me from text. NO CLAUS, he shouted in big blue text, DEMS USED TO HAVE A PLAN.

Vic came up on mic soon enough. "Now Claus said something completely wrong before," Vic opined smarmily. "Before, when Dems ran campaigns, they had positive plans." I waited patiently for his rebuttal. "When Clinton ran against George Bush Senior in 1992, he had a plan. The slogan was 'It's the economy, stupid.' They were saying to people, vote for Bush only if you're doing better economically."

My jaw dropped open. Did I just hear what I thought I heard? Wait, no one could be that stupid. He's trying to say that Dems had a positive idea in 1992, and then says that the idea was to make the election a referendum on Bush I's economic stewardship. No one I've ever heard in PT has ever gotten on mic, tried to rebut an argument, and then proceeded to cut their own legs out with their first example. It's like he pulled a grenade pin, tossed it a few feet, and then jumped on it belly first.

I was laughing so hard I could barely speak when my turn came around again. Honestly, if I had been searching for an example of the principle I was talking about initially, I could hardly have found a better one than Vic handed to me immediately. The quality of wingnut is definitely deteriorating, like the genetic mutation you'd expect from multiple retread cloning. Well, you know what they say about the Alabama education system: someone has to do all the menial labor.

JC