If you were bashing somebody on the Left, yours would be just a routine post over on Current Vents. It says a lot about the mindset of the Rightist majority around here that you feel compelled to post it on Flame and sign off with "pasting Thermal Tiles to my skin as quickly as possible". It's to your credit that you can distinguish between flaming and reasoned political discourse. Few on the Right can make that claim.

Leonard Pitts Jr. wrote a column the other day about the proposal to create a Liberal talk radio network:

But at least one radio executive, Kraig T. Kitchen, a purveyor of conservative programming, doesn't think Lib Radio will fly. He doubts it will have mass appeal because liberal blowhards don't blow hard enough. That is, they present issues with too much complexity.



This, apparently, is a bad thing.

I guess that means the alternative approach -- simplistic, chest-thumping demagoguery -- is . . . WHAT? Good?

Well, there's a scary thought.

I mean, naif that I am, I'd like to think the ability to see the world in multiple dimensions, to think beneath the surface, to handle complexity, is inherently neither liberal nor conservative. I'd like to think it is the mark of thoughtfulness, maturity and intelligence, period. And I'd like to think those are things we'd all hope to be. Certainly dialogue rooted in those qualities would be of significantly higher quality than most of what now passes for social and political discourse.

I'll grant Kitchen's point: Liberal talk show hosts have yet to prove their ability to draw an audience of simple-minded yahoos. However, I would submit that simple-minded yahoos, whether they are stumping for causes precious to the left or the right, contribute little to any discussion about the significant issues of the day.

And one of the reasons conversation about those issues so frequently bogs down in trivialities, stupidity and flat meanness is that yahoo values have, in large part, become the nation's values.

I don't know about you, but I've about had it with bumper sticker dogmatism, become fed up with the ``Crossfire/McLaughlin'' school of discourse, in which he or she who yells the loudest is perceived to have the best ideas. I'm bored with the lack of substance, the shallowness and the intellectual dishonesty. Most of all, I'm tired of ideology as armed camp, in which the goal is not to find an answer, not to figure out the best way, but simply to win the fight.

Don't get me wrong. Spirited, pointed and even bruising debate is the lifeblood of a democracy. But to watch politicians wrangle sometimes, to see the talking heads go at it on public affairs programs, even to read certain rigidly ideological pundits

[and HabitableZone posters] , is to get the sense, not just that the argument has no point, but that the argument IS the point. And that critical thinking has become a lost art.

If the shoe fits....

--Robert