Comments on The Belmont Club"Punch back twice as hard"

wretchard,
He is confident in his Old Guard and strangely obsessed with conceding nothing; in retaining and extending all the ground he has taken; in standing fast. There must be no retreat.
May he meet his Stalingrad.

But in any prolonged face off with the amateurs they’ll discover that the newbies don’t stay newbies forever.
At the beginning of the Peloponnesian Wars the superiority of the Spartiates in battle was such a given that the Athenians went to extraordinary lengths to avoid challenging it. Fighting Sparta was the ancient equivalent of the “land war in Asia.” It was also considered a given on both sides that the Athenian fleet was an invinceble strategic weapon. After 30 years of almost constant warfare the Athenians saw their fleet destroyed and the all the hoplites in the greek polis, who were really small farmers, had become battle hardened veterans. Ultimately the Spartans were defeated on land at Platea.

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I am reposting this from “In the interests of honest debate.”

One reason people got excited is that it was so unnecessary to run this, if taken at face value with best intentions, rumor collecting operation from the White House. Soros, who owns this administration, has already set up Factcheck.org and they have dozens of other media outlets toiling on their behalf. So why the need to drag in the symbol of the Executive Mansion? Was it just to rub salt in the wounds of conservatives? A variation of Clinton’s renting out the Lincoln bedroom to prove it is theirs now? Much of what happens seems to be designed by Axelrod and company to deliberately inflame the Right in order to discredit it.

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buckets,
(on comparing Obama to Sauron, who spied bad news in the palantir)
Is there anything JRR Tolkien didn’t peg exactly right, lo those many decades ago?

It never seemed to occur to kindly old Professor T to explore either whiskey's culturally masochistic women or the human drive for technical innovation. His societies were remarkably static both physically and culturally. That was understandable for his creatures that are essentially immortal but seems to leave out a big part of what motivates human activity. The only one who is described as devising inventions is Saruman the evil fallen Maier.

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Unsk,
(who counseled nonviolence and courage and faith in the Constitution)
Well put. People are reachable often if we do not preempt the conversation into a confrontation. That does not mean conceding anything important. Remember the Left has grown up within the blanket of security and prosperity provided by traditional America. Many, probably most of them, cherish the role of gadfly but do not want to see the horse, or the cash cow, destroyed.

Yesterday I was talking to a woman, aged between middle age and elderly. Her door was well festooned with stickers from GreenPeace and the Natural Resources Defense Council and World Wildlife Fund etc When the conversation touched on 9-11 I got the automatic reaction "That was the government." The fact was though that this committed left winger was very distrustful of crooks and charlatans and thugs, from any or either end of politics. They wanted competent honest government that would not threaten their rights. They wanted America productive and successful. Are there a host of issues in which they have been trained to react in a way we might find illogical? Certainly but that does not mean that we can not appeal to such people with clear honest communication that does not pander. If we keep explaining the corruption behind the housing meltdown and the links to the Democratic Party then we can win.