So you want to write a political rant, but you’re afraid you might be too rational or that you’ll inadvertently include substance? Logical thinking does tend to get in the way, but fortunately for all of us, there are excellent models to help us learn the techniques of the kind of rant that gets forwarded to everyone who already agrees with us.
Note: Before you are tempted to laugh snidely at the particular political viewpoint below, remember this: No person or particular perspective is immune to the rant. No matter who you are or how righteous you think your viewpoint is, no matter your party affiliation or whether, rant aside, you have a point, if you harp on illogically instead of making that point rationally, you are ranting, and that rant serves many purposes, none of them being to support your point of view or persuade anyone that you are right.
The Original
April 17, 2009
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington DC 20500
Mr. Obama:
I have had it with you and your administration, sir. Your conduct on your recent trip overseas has convinced me that you are not an adequate representative of the United States of America collectively or of me personally.
You are so obsessed with appeasing the Europeans and the Muslim world that you have abdicated the responsibilities of the President of the United States of America . You are responsible to the citizens of the United States . You are not responsible to the peoples of any other country on earth.
I personally resent that you go around the world apologizing for the United States , telling Europeans that we are arrogant and do not care about their status in the world. Sir, what do you think the First World War and the Second World War were all about if not the consideration of the peoples of Europe ? Are you brain dead? What do you think the Marshall Plan was all about? Do you not understand or know the history of the 20th century?
Where do you get off telling a Muslim country that the United States does not consider itself a Christian country? Have you not read the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution of the United States ? This country was founded on Judeo- Christian ethics and the principles governing this country, at least until you came along, come directly from this heritage. Do you not understand this?
Your bowing to the king of Saudi Arabia is an affront to all Americans. Our President does not bow down to anyone, let alone the Saudi Arabia CEO. You don’t show Great Britain , our best and one of our oldest allies, the respect they deserve, yet you bow down to the king of Saudi Arabia . How dare you, sir! How dare you!
You can’t find the time to visit the graves of our greatest generation because you don’t want to offend the Germans but make time to visit a mosque in Turkey . You offended our dead and every veteran when you give the Germans more respect than the people who saved the German people from themselves. What’s the matter with you?
I am convinced that you and the members of your administration have the historical and intellectual depth of a mud puddle and should be ashamed of yourselves, all of you.
You are so self-righteously offended by the big bankers and the American automobile manufacturers yet do nothing about the real thieves in this situation, Mr. Dodd, Mr. Frank, Franklin Raines, Jamie Gorelic, the Fannie Mae and the Freddie Mac gangs. What do you intend to do about them? Anything? I seriously doubt it.
What about the U.S. House members passing out $9.1 million in bonuses to their staff members on top of the $2.5 million in automatic pay raises that lawmakers gave themselves? I understand the average House aide got a 17 % bonus. I took a 5% cut in my pay to save jobs with my employer. You haven’t said anything about that. Who authorized that? I surely didn’t!
Executives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will be receiving $210 million in bonuses over an eighteen-month period, that’s $45 million more than the AIG bonuses, which are bad enough. In fact, Fannie and Freddie executives have already been awarded $51 million. Not a bad take. Who authorized that and why haven’t you expressed your outrage at this group who are largely responsible for the economic mess we have right now.
I resent that you take me and my fellow citizens as brain-dead and not caring about what you idiots do.
We are watching what you are doing and we are getting increasingly fed up with all of you.
I also want you to know that I personally find just about everything you do and say to be offensive to every one of my sensibilities.
I promise you that I will work tirelessly to see that you do not get a chance to spend two terms destroying my beautiful country.
Sincerely,
An ordinary American.
P.S. This is going to email addresses everywhere…it’s past time for all Americans to wake up!
Analysis of a Rant: Step by Step
April 17, 2009
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington DC 20500
One of the best techniques of the political rant is the good old-fashioned letter format. It makes the ramblings seem official, and those who agree with the letter get a false sense of having done their civic duty vicariously through the writer without having to lift a finger.
I believe this was an actual letter sent to the president, largely because the writer of this email has been tracked down and does claim it as his own. Note that it is relatively error free, which is unusual for a rant, but in other ways, it is the verbal analog of the old man shaking his fist at the sky. The perfect rant.
Mr. Obama:
Burn! Take that “Mister” Obama. This guy is totally disrespecting you with his lack of salutation and deliberate omission of your job title. Step 1 in writing a political rant is to distinguish it from a persuasive letter. The persuasive letter hopes to change the recipient’s mind and therefore does not open by deliberately insulting said recipient. The rant letter is purely for venting purposes, such as when your street corner’s taken or when your sandwich board got ruined in the rain.
If your letter is persuasive, you might discover that it actually has an effect on the recipient and perhaps even makes a change in the situation you are lamenting. If that happens—in fact, if your letter is taken seriously at all by the recipient—you have failed.
A political rant is taken seriously only by the people who already agree with it. If you put your letter into email format and it gets forwarded, then you have succeeded. Not only have you written a bona fide political rant, you get the added bonus of having your ego massaged by all the people who receive it, agree with it, pass it on, and maybe even write to congratulate you. And if getting your ego pumped up with self-righteousness isn’t the purpose of a political rant, I don’t know what is. Now, don’t stop to question whether these people are genuinely representative of the population. That would be a rational question, and rational thinking has no place in the political rant.
I have had it with you and your administration, sir.
Classic opening line of the rant. If the president had read past the salutation slight, he would not read further than this line, hence ensuring that this letter does not get mistaken for an effort to effect change. Notice the term of respect “sir,” a facetious inversion on the complete omission of such a term in the salutation.
Your conduct on your recent trip overseas has convinced me that you are not an adequate representative of the United States of America collectively or of me personally.
Step 2 in a political rant: Sprinkle in a little egomania. No political rant is complete without the writer deciding that his views are those of the nation. A rational letter would have stopped at “me personally,” because it is illogical to presume to speak for an entire nation unless one is the elected leader of that nation (and even then, the leader never speaks for everyone). But a rant needs to justify its existence (since it clearly isn’t intended for any constructive purpose), and this justification usually requires assuming that one’s self-righteous anger applies to as many other people as possible.
You are so obsessed with appeasing the Europeans and the Muslim world that you have abdicated the responsibilities of the President of the United States of America.
Step 3: Start tossing out accusations but don’t—I repeat, do not—provide evidence for them. Strong language like “obsessed” is fantastic, but you ruin the rhetorical effect if you even so much as acknowledge that it might be hyperbole. Especially when it’s easily quantifiable by simply looking at the percentage of time spent on tactics for appeasing the Europeans and Muslims, for example. You do not want to start getting into verifiable data in a rant. If you had evidence to back your opinion, you wouldn’t be writing a rant in the first place. So toss in the exaggerated terms, and if anyone questions them, be prepared to fall back on the old “It’s just my opinion and I’m as entitled to that as anyone” line (i.e., the subjectivist fallacy).
Similarly, the lovely word “abdicated” is really the jewel of this rant. Most of the people who enjoy and forward political rants will have to look that word up, and when they do, they will feel even more vindicated that someone so well spoken as you is foaming at the mouth on their behalf. Again, be careful about being too specific. The responsibilities of the president of the United States are fairly well delineated, and to start pointing out how he abdicated them would open you up to having to provide evidence. Once again, evidence is the enemy of the political rant. Avoid it at all costs.
You are responsible to the citizens of the United States. You are not responsible to the peoples of any other country on earth.
Step 4: Toss out a straw man argument, and when possible, do so with another logical fallacy thrown in. By the time any reader manages to untangle your logic, the rant will have multiplied 100 times in cyberspace.
Here, the writer deftly skips over having to make the argument that the president is not being responsible to the citizens of the United States and simply assumes that he isn’t and that the president knows it. The writer then scolds the president for this fact he made up, adding a false dilemma (a.k.a. either/or fallacy) on top of it to make the president seem even more irresponsible: you are either responsible to the citizens of the United States or you are responsible to the peoples of other countries. You can’t be both. (I mean, who wants a president who’s just plain responsible, right? That would be insane.)
The lesson here is that the most winnable arguments you can make in a political rant are the ones you make up yourself.
I personally resent that you go around the world apologizing for the United States, telling Europeans that we are arrogant and do not care about their status in the world.
Step 5: Use irony whenever possible but without a trace of self-awareness. If you are going to complain about being called arrogant, do so with as much arrogance as possible. If you are resentful of the president saying that Americans do not care about the status of Europeans, make this point directly after asserting that the U.S. president is not responsible to the peoples of other countries on earth.
Be sure to misstate what the recipient actually said and argue against that (you can never have too many straw mans in your rant). If the person says America has at times shown arrogance, interpret that as a blanket judgment of America being arrogant. If the person says that America has at times failed to appreciate Europe’s leading role in the world, interpret that as Americans not caring about Europe’s status in the world. Then get angry about your own misinterpretations.
Similarly, stating any kind of failure, regardless of whether it is aimed at all parties and is qualified, is the equivalent of an apology. That is an overarching rule in politics. Admitting failure = bad. It is very important that a political rant hold our country to ethical standards below those we hold for our children. If your six-year-old destroys a friend’s toy, then lies about why she did it, most of you would teach her to admit what she did because that is the ethical thing to do. Beyond this admission, you would probably expect her to apologize, because that is the ethical thing to do and because the admission itself is not the equivalent of an apology.
But the United States is beneath all that in a political rant. The standards we hold for ourselves and even for those of us who are still learning the basics of ethical behavior, our children, are much too high for our country. If you do not insult your country under the guise of patriotism, you are not writing an effective political rant.
Sir, what do you think the First World War and the Second World War were all about if not the consideration of the peoples of Europe? Are you brain dead? What do you think the Marshall Plan was all about? Do you not understand or know the history of the 20th century?
Step 6: Dodge the issue. When a person is referring to the actions of people and countries over the past decade, argue against it by going back to what people and countries did more than 60 years ago. The non sequitur is your friend. The beauty of this device is that people might actually argue with the motivations you ascribe to our country for entering these wars, and you can then wrap them up in that complex argument, diverting their attention from the fact that your point doesn’t make any sense to begin with. In a political rant, you can argue that a man is wrong about what people did and said over the past ten years by pointing to what people did and said in the first half of the previous century, and people will applaud you! (Note: This does not work as well in real life. That your grandparents or great-grandparents did not speed back in the early twentieth century will not convince the officer not to give you a ticket today. Real life requires personal responsibility. Rants do not.)
And of course, repeat step 5—the irony of asking, “Are you brain dead?” in the midst of a mindlessly illogical argument—and step 4, “Do you not understand or know the history of the 20th century?” based on the straw man that this history is relevant to the point being criticized and therefore if the recipient does not acknowledge this history, he must be ignorant. This has endless potential. You can raise any number of irrelevant arguments and then claim that the person you’re criticizing is too ignorant to address them.
Where do you get off telling a Muslim country that the United States does not consider itself a Christian country?
This is almost the best irony of the entire rant. If any of you can top this in your rants, you deserve an award. To criticize the president for behaving in the exact same way as the Founding Fathers takes an audacity (or ignorance) that puts even talk radio hosts to shame. Yeah, Obama, where do you get off saying to a Muslim country almost exactly what our Founding Fathers said to another Muslim country in the Treaty of Tripoli: “As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion” (article 11).
Unfortunately, this irony is tainted because the writer is again misstating what the president said. The president didn’t actually say that the United States doesn’t consider itself a Christian country. The prepared speech said, “We are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.” He goofed in the delivery and said the above, but with the first part as “we are no longer a Christian nation—at least, not just.”
And the writer is correct that Obama is wrong, although not for the reasons he seems to suggest. Obama is wrong to say “no longer.” We never were a Christian nation, not according to the evidence. We have always been a nation with Christians forming the majority of the population, but our government is not and has never been Christian. Which brings me to the best irony in this rant.
Have you not read the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution of the United States? This country was founded on Judeo-Christian ethics and the principles governing this country, at least until you came along, come directly from this heritage. Do you not understand this?
Step 7: Be sure to point to evidence that demonstrates the opposite of your point, such as the Constitution, which states explicitly that the government does not respect the establishment of any religion. Christianity isn’t even mentioned. And since the readers who get this far will be those who agree with you already, don’t worry that the Declaration of Independence isn’t the founding document of our government or that it also doesn’t mention Christianity, just God. You can safely assume the Founding Fathers meant Christianity, despite the evidence of deism among the signatories, because your readership won’t demand evidence for what they want to believe is true.
And most people assume that our laws are based on Judeo-Christian laws because of their vague understanding of the Bible inventing prohibitions against murder, theft, etc., which is of course not true. The Bible isn’t the primary source for any of the ethics in our laws, and actually following the laws in the Bible would in many cases put people in jail in America (such as killing your children for disobeying, stoning rape victims, or dashing babies’ heads against rocks). Even the entire concept of dying for someone else’s crime is anti-American. If someone kills my loved one, I would not consider it moral for someone else to go to prison or be put to death in the murderer’s place. American justice is based on personal responsibility. The Bible’s justice, not so much. You can usually count on the people who are most in favor of the Bible ruling our land being the ones who haven’t actually read much of it. Fortunately for this ranter, these people constitute the bulk of readers who will agree with the ravings herein. The lesson here? Know your audience. You don’t have to know the facts. Just know your audience.
Your bowing to the king of Saudi Arabia is an affront to all Americans. Our President does not bow down to anyone, let alone the Saudi Arabia CEO. You don’t show Great Britain, our best and one of our oldest allies, the respect they deserve, yet you bow down to the king of Saudi Arabia . How dare you, sir! How dare you!
Step 8: Blow issues of symbolism way out of proportion to disguise the fact that you have no substance in your rant. A president lacking a decent adviser on protocol is wide open to these attacks. Assume his gaffes are intentional (because every president wants to intentionally embarrass himself). You shouldn’t be just upset, you should be vitriolic. “How dare you use the salad fork for your main course, sir! How dare you!” See, it applies across the board. The height of the standard you hold for the president’s protocol abilities should match the depth of the standard you hold for our country’s ethical standards. Keep these priorities straight or you run the risk of someone rational taking your rant seriously.
You can’t find the time to visit the graves of our greatest generation because you don’t want to offend the Germans but make time to visit a mosque in Turkey. You offended our dead and every veteran when you give the Germans more respect than the people who saved the German people from themselves. What’s the matter with you?
Step 8 in action again. It is far more important that the president spend time on symbolic gestures than on substantive work for our country. The true ranter doesn’t want the president to actually accomplish anything. That would give the writer less to rant about in the future, and no ranter stops at just one. Be sure to create straw man motivations for the recipient so that you can get even angrier at these imaginary motives.
And no, going to these graves on the most significant day possible, D-Day, is not acceptable. That’s too late. He should go every single time he’s in Europe. I have to take the ranter to task on this one, however. He doesn’t carry it nearly far enough. Obviously, if it is offensive for the president not to visit this cemetery every time he’s in Europe, then he really should visit them all (unless the ranter thinks these soldiers weren’t important, of course): Aisne-Marne, France; Ardennes, Belgium; Brittany, France; Brookwood, England; Cambridge, England; Epinal, France; Flanders Field, Belgium; Florence, Italy; Henri-Chapelle, Belgium; Lorraine, France; Luxembourg, Luxembourg; Meuse-Argonne, France; Netherlands, Netherlands; Oise-Aisne, France; Rhone, France; Sicily-Rome, Italy; Somme, France; St. Mihiel, France; Suresnes, France.
Also, don’t forget to repeat step 2. Don’t just speak for yourself, speak for all other veterans. In fact, don’t stop there: speak for the dead as well. Be an egomaniacal medium. Remember, you need to make it very clear that this is a rant, which requires you to constantly outdo your own narcissism with each line. If you were to speak only for yourself, people might actually believe you care about someone other than yourself, and that is not something your readers will be able to empathize with.
I am convinced that you and the members of your administration have the historical and intellectual depth of a mud puddle and should be ashamed of yourselves, all of you.
Step 9: Stop to make a self-consciously clever insult, and try to engage the guilt by association (a.k.a. hasty generalization) logical fallacy so that you can insult as many people as possible. No, it doesn’t matter that you haven’t demonstrated the recipient’s guilt in the first place. Do you want to write a political rant or not? Stop fixating on this “evidence” business. The kids on the playground didn’t need evidence to call you names, did they? You think a political rant is somehow above the tactics of playground bullies?
Once again, note the irony. When choosing your insults, be careful to choose something, such as poor historical and intellectual depth, that you are demonstrating in your own rant. This is key. The effective political ranter is self-centered, not self-aware. The difference is crucial.
You are so self-righteously offended by the big bankers and the American automobile manufacturers yet do nothing about the real thieves in this situation, Mr. Dodd, Mr. Frank, Franklin Raines, Jamie Gorelic, the Fannie Mae and the Freddie Mac gangs. What do you intend to do about them? Anything? I seriously doubt it.
Step 10: Make predictions about the future and then get angry with the recipient because you are certain he will fulfill these predictions. Nothing makes people madder than the actions they imagine people are going to take. (Just the other day, I grounded my toddler for getting a girl pregnant in 2023.) The best time to make these predictions is in a rant that is written before the recipient has time to act on every issue. Three months into an administration is ideal because it’s long enough for your readers to have unreasonably high expectations but not long enough for these expectations to be met. The longer you wait, the more you limit the range of predictions you can make.
What about the U.S. House members passing out $9.1 million in bonuses to their staff members on top of the $2.5 million in automatic pay raises that lawmakers gave themselves? I understand the average House aide got a 17 % bonus. I took a 5% cut in my pay to save jobs with my employer. You haven’t said anything about that. Who authorized that? I surely didn’t!
Step 11: Misattribution. Be sure to blame to the president for actions others took that he had nothing to do with, then get righteously angry. Acts of Congress are always good ones because most readers (and writers) of political rants have a poor grasp of the responsibilities and powers of U.S. branches of government (recall that our writer demonstrates never having read the Constitution, for example). Here, the ranter deftly blames the president for actions taken solely by Congress. Then he goes one step further into the absurd and blames the president for his employer cutting his pay. “Who authorized that?” will not be met with “Um, your employer?” by the people who read this email, although he does risk alienating readers in far worse situations, such as those who were laid off because their employers didn’t offer the pay cut option instead. His pay cut is minor compared with what many Americans are going through, so this whining might be a mistake. On the other hand, the readership has a tendency to act against their own best interests and might be willing to gloss over this for the sake of the rest of the rant, which they agree with. A risk, but perhaps not a deal breaker.
Not only should you blame the recipient for problems caused by others in addition to your own problems (clearly, he could have done something about your hemorrhoids too, right?), but you should remember to keep building on step 2. Your egomania shouldn’t remain static. It needs to crescendo. Not only is the president responsible for your employer cutting your pay, he didn’t say one word about your personal situation. Not one word about you. He didn’t even notice your haircut.
It probably seems that this is going too far, to actually get angry about not being personally responded to by the president. But you have to be the center of the universe in your rant. Your adoring readers feel this way about themselves. If you do not reflect this, they will not completely identify with your missive. Look in the mirror and repeat: “I am the center of the universe. I am a victim. Even the president should address my personal problems and fix them.”
Executives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will be receiving $210 million in bonuses over an eighteen-month period, that’s $45 million more than the AIG bonuses, which are bad enough. In fact, Fannie and Freddie executives have already been awarded $51 million. Not a bad take. Who authorized that and why haven’t you expressed your outrage at this group who are largely responsible for the economic mess we have right now.
See step 11. With presidents in particular, you can always get away with blaming the current one for the past one’s actions. This is tried and true. Be sure to add some numbers in there to outrage readers so that they focus on these and perhaps won’t notice that all the facts and figures in the world won’t make the blame fall on the wrong shoulders.
I resent that you take me and my fellow citizens as brain-dead and not caring about what you idiots do.
Lead into your concluding remarks with yet another ironic straw man wrapped up in an ad hominem logical fallacy (i.e., attacking the person, often through name calling, usually because you are incapable of criticizing ideas instead). Make baseless accusations and then get angry about them, preferably using accusations that you have successfully shown apply to you. If your rant is successful, you will be the one treating your fellow citizens as brain dead.
There’s also an added ironic twist wrapped up in the name calling: I resent you taking me as an idiot, . . . idiot.
Magnificent.
We are watching what you are doing and we are getting increasingly fed up with all of you.
Here is where the tireless work of building up your egomania reaches its peak, taking on a menacing tone of paranoid schizophrenia: We are watching you. <shiver> This is brilliantly stalker-esque, but because the writer has built up to this, taking the reader along every narcissistic step of the way, those who already agree with the writer’s sentiments will feel that this is not creepy but true. He does speak for them. They are watching and getting increasingly fed up. (Although the ranter might want to avoid the soft-pedaling—he’s obviously fed up, not getting increasingly so. Getting increasingly fed up is kind of like getting increasingly pregnant.)
I also want you to know that I personally find just about everything you do and say to be offensive to every one of my sensibilities.
I promise you that I will work tirelessly to see that you do not get a chance to spend two terms destroying my beautiful country.
And here we have the egomaniacal denouement. After reaching the previous pinnacle of mentally unstable egotism in which the writer presumes to threaten on behalf of us all, he takes it down a notch, bringing it back to his personal perspective while slyly making the most blanket statement of disgust in the entire rant. To the rational reader, this first line discounts every point made. The writer admits that there’s nothing the recipient can do right because everything he does is offensive to the writer. The true ranter doesn’t get upset with someone because of specific reasons, as the rant will usually suggest. The true ranter simply dislikes the person, then goes about finding, and often inventing, reasons. This is your mission as a political ranter. Do not make the mistake of focusing on substance. The rant must be one big ad hominem argument, one big attack on a person rather than an argument of ideas. In this sense, the political rant is gossip. You will be successful if you emulate the stereotypical catty old woman who knows the dirt on everyone, and when she doesn’t, she’s not afraid to make some up. If you can’t stomach this, then go write a letter with your fancy “substance” and address ideas with that waste of time you call “logic.” Sure, your letter might get read by the recipient and might actually lead to positive change. But will it be forwarded with an all caps subject line and several exclamation points?
I rest my case.
Sincerely,
An ordinary American.
Step 12: No matter who you are or what your rant actually suggests, you are always the ordinary American. After asserting repeatedly throughout the letter that you are so special, you can presume to speak for a nation and for all soldiers, living and dead. After assuming a level of entitlement so strong that you believe even the president should pay attention to your specific personal problems, it is important to assert just the opposite: that you are just an ordinary American. This is a way for readers to identify further with you, because you’re just an average joe, just like them. It has the added bonus of implying that an egomaniacal, borderline paranoid schizophrenic nutjob is an ordinary American. Scared yet, Obama?
P.S. This is going to email addresses everywhere…it’s past time for all Americans to wake up!
Step 13: End with an obtuse veiled threat. Here, this rests on several assumptions: (1) an email forward that goes to many people actually changes people’s minds (not likely—these emails are forwarded by people who already agree); (2) this email contains something that would wake up Americans (well, there’s some truth to this: America should wake up to the mental illness and illogical thinking that may be more prevalent in this country than we think); and (3) an email forward should be a motivating factor for the recipient to change because email forwards are that powerful, rather than being laughed at and often evoking pity for the writer except for the small percentage of people who pass it amongst themselves in a relatively small self-congratulatory circle.
These are important assumptions for you to make when devising your political rant. After all, this may be the only means you have to feel like you have some kind of power and control in your life, and if your political gossip in real life is starting to make people go out of their way to avoid you, then your online community may be the only thing that stands between you and deep personal despair. So by all means remember: The political rants you write are all you have left. Don’t let ethics, logic, or human decency stand in your way of writing them.
Note: The original actually contained the name and address of a fourth-grade teacher, which I’ve left off because it was mistakenly passed on with the forward, so there’s no sense in invading her privacy here. The letter was actually sent by Frank Bell. Mr. Bell takes full credit for the letter.
So you’ve read this and decided you don’t want to get into political rant writing? You’d rather know how to respond when you receive something like this in hopes of convincing some people that the soapbox they’re standing on isn’t exactly stable?
Well, I have some bad news. You’re not likely to convince the writer of anything. A person who makes up his mind, then searches for (or invents) facts to support this opinion, especially one who actually admits this in his own rant is not the person who is going to be swayed from this view by facts or reason.
But take heart. I was wrong to say that emails like this don’t persuade anyone. That’s not entirely true. They don’t persuade anyone to agree with the email, no. Only those who already agree will find this diatribe convincing. But some who receive this will be more middle of the road, and this type of rant does a wonderful job of convincing people not to agree with this email and to perhaps distance themselves even further from this type of politics and person. Just as the birther movement’s self-evident ridiculousness has embarrassed many Republicans and Libertarians, pushing them away from and making them more wary of the extremists in their parties; and just as the 9/11 truther movement has likewise embarrassed many Democrats, pushing them and independent progressives and liberals away from and making them more wary of the extremists in their rank, so, too, will rants like these have the opposite of the writer’s intended effect, bringing out support only from those who were supportive of the view before the rant was penned and driving away those who might have been sympathetic before reading something like this.
So don’t worry about responding with an argument. To those who agree with the rant, the argument won’t make any sense and might even fuel the fire. To those who don’t agree or who are on the fence, you can’t make an argument against this rant that’s any more powerful than the argument the rant makes against itself.
So respond however you like. For example:
Dear Aunt Clara:
Thank you for sending this. I TOTALLY AGREE!!!!!!!! I mean, this went out three months into his presidency, right? Why the hell hadn’t he changed everything by then? He had three months. It’s like when I tried to read a book that one time. I got to page 30 and thought, come on now, does it really take another 200 pages to finish this idea? I could have read a condensed version on a blog and been back to my Nintendo by now. So frustrating. Especially when you see how much all the other presidents drastically changed our country in their first three months, like, um, well, you know. The other ones did, I’m sure, right?
And according to the movies, time travel has obviously been perfected. The Government just doesn’t want us to know about it. So Obama should have been able to go back and fix the problems from the Bush administration that are listed here, and he should be able to go into the future to address the problems that the prophet who wrote this email has foreseen.
I’m so sick of people like this so-called president going around being diplomatic and trying to take care of problems instead of focusing on symbolism or even the very real problems out there—mine. Where was he when I failed my algebra final? WHO AUTHORIZED THAT? I mean, if the guy who wrote this brilliant letter doesn’t need to provide facts to support his assertions, why on earth should I have to show my work, even if my answers are wrong? Clearly, this man demonstrates that I don’t have to bother learning facts or logic. I’m inspired to quit school (stupid socialist institution), and I have you and this fine gentleman to thank for this momentous decision.
Forever indebted,
Melanie
