when the facts speak for themselves...
Little Phil's signature proclaims: "When the facts speak for themselves, only a fool insists on having a debate." But after all, the "facts" never speak. Human beings speak; facts do not. Human beings sometimes imagine that facts, or inanimate objects, or their fillings, "speak"; one of the usual technical term for these individuals is "delusional."
Little Phil is never prepared to debate. His typical exchange consists of a long citation from one of his Usual Suspect "news" sources, a brief commentary thereupon, and a closing assurance that his citation is unanswerable, packaged with a bit of abuse for all dissenters.
It's odd that we continue to play by LP's self-serving rules. BP, for example, differs from many of us here in that he sees no correspondence whatsoever between the rise of the Third Reich seventy years ago and the consolidation of power by the Bush-Cheney-von Rumsfeld-Ashcroft junta. When called upon this, however, he puts up a spirited argument in defense of his position. Little Phil, by contrast, will ever fall back upon "When the facts speak for themselves, only a fool insists on having a debate," leavened with a bit of invective and conveniently excusing himself from the dreary necessity of logically defending his positions. When caught out in a more than usually indefensible position he merely ignores that salient.
I fear that we're doomed to play Little Phil's game here. At least we can take some comfort in his delusion that he's strutting before the ages--whereas the nose-breathing contingent understands that his oft-cited intimations of immortality will be lost in the signal-to-noise ratio long before the history of this sorry period is ever compiled.
cordially,
[edit: preposition substitution]
