Latimer on Law

Ouingnut Ouija

Wingnut Ouija  

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations,  or the dictates of  our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
            - John Adams, Trial Lawyer, defending British Soldiers after "Boston Massacre"             

Facts are stupid things.
            - Ronald Reagan, B-movie actor, Freudian slip mangling Adams quote.

 Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of  terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.
            - Matthew Rycroft, MI6 Downing Street Memo, July 23, 2002

Several years ago my former law partner and I travelled to Wassau, Wisconsin, to take depositions on a product liability case where our client had lost an arm to a defectively designed industrial machine manufactured there.  We took a local flight from Detroit to Green Bay, a nice enough small city -like Worcester with an NFL franchise, and we rented a car for the drive through the boonies to Wassau.  

          We took depositions from everyone involved in the design and manufacture of the machine, including the president of the company who can best be described as a master of dumb looks and evasive answers -or more accurately non-answers.  And, being pathetically unimaginative as well, his evasions began to follow a predictable pattern. 

         When a difficult question was asked, i.e. one where he couldn't think up a suitable way to wander off topic and would have to acknowledge fault and inadequate design of the machine if he answered, this bold captain of industry would begin with a blank-stare pause, anywhere from fifteen seconds to several minutes, after which he would say things like, "I'll have to check with my people," or "I have to review the paperwork," or our very favorite "I gotta go lose some water," after which he would get up and go to the men's room for several minutes, apparently thinking we might ask a different question when he returned.

         Of course, we didn't ask a new question. Being the patient and determined fellows that we are, my partner and I didn't get angry or nasty with the witness or with counsel, either.  We just kept asking the same question until we got a responsive, substantive answer,  and we made it obvious that we were going to stay there and keep asking questions as long as it took for this cretin to give us a straight answer to each question.  This one deposition continued over two full days.

            To while away the time however, after a half-day of that obstructionist nonsense, I devised a little chart on a yellow legal pad listing every one of his evasive responses that we'd heard.  I then began using the chart like a Ouija board.  My partner would ask a question and while the deponent was giving us the blank stare, I would move my finger over the chart a few times and stop it on one of the evasions to see if I could predict which one he would use. 

            We had files stacked on the table, so nobody else could see my finger moving over the little yellow Ouija board.  Both defense counsel and the witness were therefore clueless as to why we snickered every time I guessed right, and our apparent jollity clearly conveyed to them that we weren't about to give up until we got everything we needed from the witness -which we eventually did. 

            Doing this blog post over the past several months, I am struck by the similarity between the predictable evasions of that dim bulb CEO in Wassau, and the equally predictable, unimaginative off-topic "talking points" we get from the purportedly "conservative" folks who reply to these postings, typically consisting of right-wing shibboleths like "tenth amendment," or "Barney Frank," or "Acorn,"  et cetera,  always only marginally pertinent to the subject under discussion if at all, and never uttered within the context of any cogent, critical analysis of the substantive topic at hand.

            I might, for example, be discussing the failure of "free market" idelology, culminating with the failure of the Bush administration's policy of deregulation in 2008.  I might use the example of Kenny Boy Lay's close personal ties with Bush to show how corporate influence corrupts our politics and damages our economy.  I will then, inevitably, hear from someone braying about Acorn, as if corrupt activity by people working for a non-profit corporation involving a few million dollars, a non-profit that has contributed to Democratic political campaigns including a President's, was even marginally comparable to for-profit corporate corruption involving billions, like Enron's, that bankrupts an entire state due to the criminal acts of a President's close friend. 

            It's a question of both perspective and relevance, two things that are totally alien to today's right-wing GOP base, and the media demagogues they fawn on and then parrot on this site.  These are people who speak and act solely on ideological preconceptions across the board, as opposed to critical analysis of specific factual situations, to determine public policy. 

           A clear example of this approach was the Bush administration's manipulation and its cynical misrepresentation of the intelligence about Saddam Hussein's alleged WMDs, outright lying or at best saying things were so that they did not in fact know to be so, in order to justify invading Iraq.  As stated by Matthew Rycroft in the MI6 "Downing Street" memo of July 2002, the Bush administration was "fixing the intelligence around the policy" instead of determining policy based on accurate and reliable intelligence, and that has cost 4,000 young American lives to date, plus a nearly trillion dollars increase in our national debt.  

           Another example is Reagan's Freudian slip, flubbing his lines while trying to quote John Adams and saying that "facts are stupid things."  That's what he really believed, though, not what Adams said about facts, because the facts and logical analysis always contradict the extremist, right-wing ideology which informs the basis of today's post-Reagan Republican agenda, consisting of a marriage between capitalist and conservative religious ideologies.  How else could an administration seriously try to classify ketchup as a vegetable in order to stiff America's children out of a nutritional school lunch just to shave a few dollars off federal support for local public schools?

          I have therefore designed a "Ouingnut Ouija" board, listing some of the most often heard "talking points" that self-described conservative  savants borrow from the likes of Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter, Beck, Sowell, Thomas, Krauthammer, et al.  Before reading the replies from the usual wingnut suspects to any future post on this site, I'll just set the Ouignut Ouija board on my desk and let my finger land where it will to see if I can predict which of the inevitable right wing obfuscations and irrelevancies the respondent will recite.

           Anyone else is free to use this Ouingnut board for his or her own amusement, even the wingnuts themselves.  If they can't think of a response based on what Rush said last night, they can just get one from the Ouingnut board and nobody will know the difference.  As for the rest of us, it won't reduce or otherwise mitigate the right-wing tripe that gets regurgitated in response to these "liberal" postings, but it might go a long way to alleviate the tedium of reading such evasive nonsense, the hackneyed rant radio "talking points" they mistake for critical analysis, the way it did for my partner and me in Wassau with the Cheesehead CEO.

           The only difference is that we two tort lawyers settled that product-liability case not long afterward for a very large sum of money, as we knew we would, but it's unlikely that the right wing media hacks and their ditto head wannabes who post on sites like this will ever just own up to their moral and intellectual bankruptcy and then stop bleating about things like  "tort reform," "free markets" and "family values."