Tired, tired, tired of being in the minority in the corporate IT sales office that I work in. I don't typically advertise my political beliefs, but somehow (maybe it was the beers), I've probably let it be known over sometime over the past few years that I'm of the liberal/leftist persuasion and this caught the attention of one particularly irritable Rush Limbaugh dittohead. You might have this situation also...here's one thing that I've found works very well.
Dittohead spied me coming into the office and couldn't help but drop his obligatory negative Obama comment. This time it was me saying, "hey, how's it going Keith", and him saying, "well, hopefully I'll be able to survive two and a half more years of Obama." Mild, as these things go, but I happen to know that his world revolves around the state of his material fortune so I commented that I thought that "somehow" I knew he'd manage.
Then of course, I asked him, " by the way, how's the value of your 401K today versus sixteen months ago?" and " how's the state of our business versus sixteen months ago?" Usually that's enough to silence him, because he rarely bothers to do any sort of research into any of the issues he brings up other than the received wisdom he gets via our local AM radio station.
By the way, WJR 760 used to be a fairly enjoyable and engaging station to listen to here in Detroit, but after local radio legend J.P. McCarthy died back in the early nineties, it became hostage to the Big Fat Idiot and a bunch of wannabes who turned the formerly politically neutral sports/talk format into a string of three-hour long conservative rants with carefully-screened callers and no public discourse of any value to a city that could seriously use some productive and substantive discussion leading to actual workable ideas, but I digress. The licensees of the public radio spectrum are not necessarily interested in serving the public good any longer.
Back to my co-worker. I also happen to know that at the heart of it all, he just can't accept an African-American as president, so it's no surprise that he finds himself at a loss to explain his positions when challenged. So here's what I also said to him. "Keith, let's just say that I wasn't a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat from a family that has been very active in the worker's rights movement for the last century - sell me on the idea of becoming a Republican...just sell me...I'm listening..." I continued,"...by the way, you can't say it's because of lower taxes - Obama's tax rates are lower than W's, and you can't say that Reagan's tax rates actually increased receipts and produced a higher job growth rate than Clinton's tax rates, because they didn't." He actually has the charts that prove this, because I've sent them to him before after one of our other discussions.
"And by the way, who was the last Republican president to balance a national budget?" This is a good one, because I guarantee you, none of them will know (Eisenhower).
Deficits, we know the story there. Crime rates? During Clinton's presidency, they were the lowest in a generation. Poverty? Johnson had the lowest rates during his presidency, and those rates increased under Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes while falling under Clinton. The military? Remember it was Clinton's military that defeated the Iraqis and Obama has now inherited an overstretched and overstressed fighting force that will require hundreds of billions of dollars and years to restore to it's former readiness.
I could go on, but as I had these rejoinders ready in my mind, I was met with silence...and more silence...