Dum Pendebat Filius

In the Weekly Standard, David Mamet explains his conversion from the Liberal tribe to the Conservative tribe:

“But I saw the liberals hated George Bush. It was vicious. And I thought about it, and I didn’t get it. He was no worse than the others, was he? And I’d ask my liberal friends, ‘Well, why do you hate him?’ They’d all say: ‘He lied about WMD.’ Okay. You love [John F.] Kennedy. Kennedy didn’t write Profiles in Courage — he lied about that. ‘Bush is in bed with the Saudis!’ Okay, Kennedy was in bed with the mafia.”

So: it doesn’t make sense to “hate” George W. Bush for invading Iraq and causing hundreds of thousands of deaths on the pretext of non-existent WMDs, because a prominent Democrat lied about writing a book fifty years ago. It’s the same thing!

This is why I’m sick of tribal politics. It’s just about point-scoring: if somebody on the other team points out that somebody on my team did something bad, I have to come up with a counter-example of somebody on the other team who did something bad, too. It doesn’t have to make sense, it just has to help me say My team good, your team bad. I just don’t have time for this anymore. I used to get caught up in this foolishness, too, but it’s a waste of time. Our problems will only continue to get worse as long as we’re divided into two brain-dead tribes who spend their time shouting at each other.