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Yes these are paraphrases. No that doesn't make them 'straw men'. Anyone who has been here for a few years is familiar with these arguments:
1) Yes gas prices may go up and down but the "sky is falling crowd" and their predictions of $5 gasoline are ludicrous. They make liberals look bad. Sure it might break $3, maybe even go a little higher, but you have to remember that oil is tied to the rest of the economy...etc.
Fruitcakes 1/Centrists 0 (In California and Alaska, Gas reaches $5 in multiple locations)
2) Everyone knows Saddam has weapons of mass destruction. I just think we should go about getting rid of them in a better way. It's naive to deny that Saddam has WMDs. Everyone knows he does. Something has to be done.
Fruitcakes 2/Centrists 0 (No WMDs)
3) Will all you holier than thou FREAKS shut up and let our congress get elected in 2006??!!!! They're just saying what they have to take over the senate! Are you that thick? Don't you understand POLITICS!!! It's you people's fault we always lose and nothing ever changes.
Fruitcakes 3/Centrists 0 (Powder still dry, MoveOn.org censured)
Of course, the "fruitcake" predictions always require the passage of time. The comments of "reasonable people" always invoke the current situation i.e. (Look out your window. Are your neighbors being abducted by police for their ideas?)
4) I think the whole global warning thing is a little alarmist.
Fruitcakes 4/Centrists 0 (Centrism today: Yes it is disturbing that the ice is gone from the North Pole, but it's not exactly "The Day After Tomorrow" is it?
Some issues still left open between "fruitcakes" and "reasonable people":
(1) "You people have been saying we're going to bomb Iran for two years now. So why aren't we in Iran?"
Let's hope the fruitcakes are wrong this time.
(2) We didn't lose the election due to voter fraud. You make us sound like a bunch of conspiracy theorists. We lost because of gays, too overtly liberal, etc.
Evidence continues to point to voter fraud as a contributing factor to the loss of 2004.
(3) Your neighbors aren't being abducted by the police are they?
Well, this depends on who your neighbors are. Steve Kurtz's neighbors couldn't say that. But, no, 20th century-style mass abduction of the citizen has not occurred yet. Of course, someone's neighbors are being tortured at those black sites in Eastern Europe. But to be upset about this you have to care about more than white people in the suburban United States.
(4) We're not going into a depression. The sky doesn't fall every time the stock market drops.
No, it's just a recession. I'm throwing my money in with the fruitcakes on this one.
(5) 9-11 was entirely a result of the Bush Administration's incompetence.
Any mention of such "lunacy" was deemed disgusting by centrists in 2001-2. In 2008, the idea that maybe a few people knew is a tolerable centrist position. This may never be resolved.
To be fair, the centrist can never score because the "fruitcake" can always claim that the future will prove him or her correct. But given the track record of the fruitcakes in the past 8 years, it is pure arrogance to dismiss a gloomy forecast simply because it "sounds" extreme or because the speaker seems hysterical.
Insisting that the world is calm and rational and organized might make a person appear calm and rational him or herself, but that has no effect on political reality. Government corruption, states that murder their own citizens, wealthy elites who ravage the poor and start wars, and strange unclassified black operations (what Cheney calls 'the dark side') are real world phenomena. To lightly dismiss such possibilities as "absurd" is to be a poor student of history.
No matter how wild-eyed the discussion, such possibilities are not in the same category as alien abduction, crop circles, and haunted houses.
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