Katie Couric challenged Ann Coulter, "What lie has anybody ever told about you?"
Coulter's response: "It's all ONE BIG lie. That conservatives are stupid or crazy or both, so no need to debate. Stop here. Read no further."
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*I'll grant you, a lot of people DID listen carefully to Donald Trump in the debate for 90 minutes, and independently formed their own impression that he's stupid or crazy or both. LOL :- ) But most people who think Coulter is stupid or crazy, have never read a single column; the same is true with respect to Limbaugh and others. People hate them passionately, without reading them. I highly recommend reading them.
And it happens on both sides. The right wing does indeed make false assumptions about what reasonable people on the left believe, and works itself into a left-hatin' frenzy. Based on fantasies about what the left is.
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I'd like to think that there is only a very small minority that does this, but they seem to be the people with the microphones. That to me is the biggest difference between 1986 and 2016 -- that the media "leads with" the scorn and dismissiveness, as you put it.
Diderot asked, How do we restore civility. My OWN thing would be to rephrase that: how do we get the media to treat these arguments seriously?
But I recognize that's considered "whining," as you put it, and is considered a right-wing interpretation of the problem.
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Nuanced arguments as Maguffins? Agreed. But we seem to have found a couple. :- )