In my continuing efforts to help expose as many people as possible to the assbackwardness of the modern day “conservative” Tea Partier, I present this lovingly compiled collection of tripe entitled, “20 Questions Liberals Can’t Answer.” I know what you’re thinking, and now, it’s not “How come the Tea Party hates the people of the United States so much they want to kill its government?” Nor is it, “Why does every Tea Bagger insist on conflating communism, socialism and Fascism?” It’s not even “Why are Tea Baggers so afraid of a black guy in the White House?” Instead, it’s the following questions, which I am going to go ahead and answer for Mr. John Hawkins, Conservative Hack Blogger Extraordinaire.
1) A few days ago, we were hearing that the Boston Marathon bombers COULD BE conservative, which proved that the Right is evil. Now, when we know that the terrorists are Muslims, how can the same liberals be saying that it means nothing?
Any liberals you heard prognosticating as to the ethnicity, religion or political beliefs of the attackers before they had all the information are just as idiotic as your first question. Those same liberals can tell you that the terrorists being Muslims means nothing because it’s true. It doesn’t make them decent people for rooting for the terrorists to be of one persuasion or the other, but the two have oh, I don’t know…nothing to do with each other actually.
2) If you believe we have a “right” to things like health care, food, shelter and a good education, then doesn’t that also mean you believe we also have a right to force other people to unwillingly provide those things at gunpoint?
You’re right, John. I can’t answer this question because I have no idea what the fuck it means. I’ll hazard a guess though. You’re referring to taxes aren’t you?
Taxes aren’t a punishment. Taxes are the price we agree to pay as a society in order to maintain that society. It’s cute rhetoric to call it something like “being forced at gunpoint” but thinking and rational adults — not babies who get their political ideologies from shitty fiction novelists — view taxes as more a necessary inconvenience to ensure our society doesn’t turn to utter shit.
3) How can you simultaneously want a big government that will make decisions that have an enormous impact on the lives of every American while also saying that the character and morals of our politicians don’t matter?
Who has ever said that the character and morals of our politicians doesn’t matter? Talk about a straw man argument. You just invented a belief structure for every single liberal. The problem for you is that liberals have a very strong sense of morality. Like you know, not rigging the tax code to favor the rich and then turning around and demagogueing the living shit out of the working poor for daring to be poor and and in need of assistance. Or you know, not starting a war on a credit card based on complete and utter lies and fabrication.
Oh but blowjobs? Sure. Lying about those are totally the same as causing the death of over 4,000 American troops and many more thousands of Iraqis.
4) What exactly is the “fair share” of someone’s income that he’s earned that he should be able to keep?
You don’t to cry foul about the tax code when your side does everything it can to make sure the rich pay as very little as they possibly can, despite having benefited the absolute most from our capitalist, free-market economy.
5) Why is it that time and time again, revenue paid to the treasury has GONE UP after we’ve cut taxes?
Would you care to provide any statistics and factual, historically accurate data to back that up? Nah, of course not. The polls were skewed and Romney was going to win because of “momentum” too, right?
6) Are you pro-choice or pro-abortion? If it’s pro-choice, do you feel people should be able to choose to have an assault weapon, what kind of light bulb they use in their house or whether they’d like to put their Social Security funds into a private retirement account?
Are you pro-life or pro-birth? Because if you’re pro-life you’ll be all in favor of socialized medicine and welfare. You know, for the kids.
Also, if abortions were carried out with assault rifles, would you be in favor of them?
7) If corporations are so awful, greedy and bad for the country, then shouldn’t we be celebrating when they decide to close their plants here and move overseas?
My head hurts from the levels of stupidity in this question. Corporations are bad for the country when politicians hand them their pens and let them write their own industrial regulations. Corporations are also bad for the country when they’re allowed to keep wages artificially low, stagnating middle class growth. Corporations are also bad for the country when they ship all their jobs overseas to save money, thus sending more Americans tumbling into the social safety net.
Corporations that don’t act like sociopaths though? They’re pretty okay.
8) How can liberal economists like Paul Krugman be right when they claim that our economy isn’t doing well because we aren’t spending enough money when we’re already running massive, unsustainable deficits and spending is going up every year?
Every president has spent more than his predecessor, thanks in large part to the ever growing population and the commitments of presidents before them. And if you want to talk about unsustainable deficits, why don’t we talk about putting two wars and credit cards and letting the black guy actually pick up the tab?
9) If Republicans don’t care about the poor, why do studies consistently show that they give more to charity than Democrats do?
Firstly, you linked to another hack conservative writer who cited the oldest conservative hack, George Will who cited a Syracuse study about the donation and volunteer habits of people who describe themselves as conservatives as opposed to those who call themselves liberals. There are all kinds of reasons that studies like this are idiotic, but first and foremost, it doesn’t take into account those who give anonymously. Secondly, the scope with which that study was conducted was quite large in terms of what “charitable donations” consists of. Donating to a church doesn’t exactly equate to donating to AIDS research, when much of what gets donated to churches goes towards operating the church. It’s bullshit, in other words, to claim that either side gives more to charity because thankfully most people aren’t pretentious and self-involved so much that they wear t-shirts depicting how much money they gave to charity in the previous tax year.
10) Give us a ballpark estimate: If something doesn’t change dramatically, how long do you think it will be until we have an economic crash in this country similar to the one we’re seeing in Greece or Cyprus?
By something changing dramatically, do you mean cutting Defense Spending and tightening up tax loopholes that only benefit the extremely wealthy?
11) Since we “all agree” with the idea that our level of deficit spending is “unsustainable,” what would be wrong with permanently freezing federal spending at the current level until we balance the budget by increasing revenue, cutting spending or some combination thereof?
Because our population keeps growing and more and more people are entering their twilight years. Because you can’t just stop the world’s largest economy on a dime for your own Ayn Randian wet dreams. Because when you cut off government spending like a spigot there are real-life consequences and people’s actual lives are thrown into upheaval. And lastly, because that’s just a fucking idiotic thing to do when we could just fix the tax code and get the rich people to put skin back in the game, that’s why.
12) If we change God’s definition of marriage to make gay marriage legal, then what’s the logical argument against polygamy or even adult siblings supposed to be?
As soon as God is naturalized as an American citizen, he can add his voice to the discussion. But since we don’t tell rapists to marry their victims and we don’t tell men they can treat their wives as sexual property anymore, we’ve already changed God’s definition. Oh, polygamy and incest? Those are God’s definitions of marriage too. Just ask Cain. Or Abel.
13) In a world where people can easily change states and can, with a bit more difficulty, permanently move to other roughly comparable parts of the globe, do you really think it’s feasible over the long haul to have a tax system where 86% of the income taxes are paid by the top 25% of the income earners?
No, of course not. That’s why you have to create jobs by investing in our future and not, you know by “permanently freezing federal spending at the current level until we balance the budget by increasing revenue, cutting spending or some combination thereof.”
14) If you win a lawsuit that’s filed against you, why should you have to pay huge legal bills when you did nothing wrong while the person who filed the suit pays no penalty for wrongly accusing you?
Because not every lawsuit is brought maliciously or without warrant, that’s why.
15) How can you oppose putting murderers to death and be fine with killing innocent children via abortion?
How can you call “human life” sacrosanct and then be okay with state-sponsored murder in the form of capital punishment? It’s your moral compass that’s broken. Some of us just don’t latch on to the ideologically sycophantic and scientifically ignorant definition of when “life” begins is all.
16) A minimum wage raises salaries for some workers at the cost of putting other workers out of jobs entirely. What’s the acceptable ratio for that? For every 10 people who get a higher salary, how many are you willing to see lose their jobs?
There is absolutely, positively, zero fucking evidence that raising the minimum wage has any negative impact on the economy. None. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Your entire question is therefore useless pablum.
17) The earth has been warming and cooling for thousands of years with temperature drops and increases that are much larger than the ones we’ve seen over the last century. Since we can’t adequately explain or model those changes, what makes us think we can say with any sort of confidence that global warming is being caused by man?
This question honestly only deserves one answer, “Because science, that’s why.”
18) We live in a world where people have more choices than ever before in music, entertainment, careers, news sources and what to do with their time. Shouldn’t government mirror that trend by moving towards federalism and states’ rights instead of centralizing more and more power in Washington, DC?
What the fuck? We need to destabilize the central government’s power because “Netflix?” Seriously?
19) If people in the middle class aren’t willing to pay enough in taxes to cover the government services that they use because they don’t think it’s worth the money, shouldn’t we prune back government to a level people do feel comfortable paying for in taxes?
Sure. Let’s start with the Defense contractor jobs that none of us get to vote on, yeah? It seems to me that it’s the Republicans who are trying to get away with not footing the bill for their decade long Warstravaganza at the hands of Dubya and Cheney.
20) If firms can get by with paying women 72 cents on the dollar for the same quality of work as men, then why don’t we see any firms with all female labor forces using those lower costs to dominate the marketplace?
I changed my mind. This is the dumbest question on the list. The issue with equal pay for equal work isn’t one of profits, though I’m not surprised that a conservative hack would only care about money. The point is that you’re robbing women 28 cents an hour for merely having vaginae. That’s oppression and discrimination, period. Why don’t you just admit you’re okay with discriminating against people based on their gender or sexual orientation and spare us all the mental gymnastics?