How To Be The Absolute Worst, by Pat Buchanan

It's easy to be terrible, but to be the absolute worst -- that takes effort. So let me, Pat Buchanan, show you how it's done.

Step 1: take a really important issue that makes people emotional, and make up a disgraceful lie about it, like so:

The question Gov. Jan Brewer faces?

Should Christians, Muslims, Mormons who refuse, on religious grounds, to serve same-sex couples -- that photographer, that florist, that baker, for example -- be treated as criminals?

This is in reference to the proposed Arizona law that would permit business owners to refuse service to people whose sexual preferences God doesn't like. But! Do you see what I did there? The bill has nothing to do with treating these business owners "as criminals." Business owners are already allowed to discriminate against gays in Arizona, and there's no federal law stopping them, either. So by saying this, I've achieved two things: confused people who don't know what's going on, and infuriated many that do. Now, if someone wants to argue with me, they have to spend most of their time correcting my strategic idiocy. See how that works?

Now you're ready for Step 2: Frame the debate in terms of a broad, unfalsifiable assertion that favors your argument, such as:

What we are seeing in Arizona in microcosm is what we have witnessed in America for half a century: the growing intolerance of those who preach tolerance and the corruption of the concept of civil rights.

Try proving any of that wrong. The best you'll do is produce a series of anecdotes that I'll just call rare exceptions, and you've wasted yet more of your breath refuting me, rather than making your own point.

So you see how your opponent has already been driven half-mad by my smokescreen of brazen lies and unsupported assertions. Now you're ready for Step 3: Propose something totally nonsensical and offensive:

A radical idea: Suppose we repealed the civil rights laws and fired all the bureaucrats enforcing these laws.

Does anyone think hotels, motels and restaurants across Dixie, from D.C. to Texas, would stop serving black customers? Does anyone think there would again be signs sprouting up reading "whites" and "colored" on drinking foundations and restrooms?

The obvious counter-move for my opponent now is to yell "OF COURSE THAT WOULD HAPPEN, ARE YOU EVEN SERIOUS!?" Oh look, my opponent is an angry pessimist who thinks Americans are all racist! I, Pat Buchanan, am the one who truly believes in the goodness of the human spirit.

Now, the Final Step: While your opponent is red-faced and spitting, feign ignorance of all history and cause-effect relationships:

Last year, the Supreme Court struck down the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Yet, somehow, Mississippi still has more black elected officials than any other state.

Of course, Mississippi has "more black officials than another state" precisely because until last year they had to get pre-clearance from a federal court whenever they wanted to re-draw their legislative districts. And even if my opponent is still capable of making a coherent argument through the red fog of rage that has filled her entire brain, and says exactly this, she still hasn't made a point of her own aside from "Pat Buchanan is wrong." She hasn't said that certain people should not have to just keep driving, keep walking, keep wasting their time and money trying to get this product or that service from someone who doesn't hate them because of the body they were born into. How it shouldn't just be luck of the draw whether you can shop at the store down the street. And how it would feel for your government to say "The rights of ignorant bigots are more important than whether or not you can buy groceries in your home town." Nope, none of that gets said because you have successfully been The Worst!

Related: Filthy Lucre: How To Get Rich By Pandering To Racists And Bigots, by Pat Buchanan

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["How Freedom Dies" YES REALLY IT IS CALLED THAT at Townhall via Right Wing Watch]