Tim Blair, William Ayers, Ted and Robert Kennedy, Obama and how many degrees are you away from godless communist satanism?

(Above: for Adam, and if you want a more specious reason for including it, because here on loon pond we feel so together with the loons of the world, including and especially all those readers of Tim Blair).

Thinking on the futility of having a debate with loons recently, I came up with the following four immutable laws, and a corollary:

1. By refracting everything through ideology, no satisfying understanding of anything can be achieved.

2. Following 1, exaggeration, distortion, wilful omission and commission become essential tools for debate. Tenuous connections and outright lies are especially valuable.

3. Never give in, or concede an alternative viewpoint. As in extreme fighting, submission via a choke hold is the only meaningful end game (or check mate, or your opponent storming off in a fit of rage if you prefer chess as a metaphor).

4. Always go to the extreme. Thus if you are ridiculing someone's argument, if they say nothing much will happen, insist the end of the world is nigh. If they insist it's a disaster, accuse them of chicken little tactics.

The corollary? Irrationality and hate, emotional panic, fear, uncertainty doubt and loathing are important tonal qualities which will add to the quality and impact of any debate. But wait, debate is such a sissy mamby pamby word. Remember: argument, fight, verbal glassings and choke holds, shutting out any alternatives, are essential for submission.

We recently saw a classic example of this with Piers Akerman on the national broadband network: it's a disastrous uneconomic idea with the potential for a huge blow out. Followed by: build it underground for aesthetic and practical reasons, thereby ensuring it will become a disastrous uneconomic idea.

The beauty and poignancy of this kind of tactic ensures there's no actual point in debating with a loon. You just nod and smile and listen to the charming squawk with either wild eyed alarm or ecstasy.

And I'm indebted to Tim Blair yet again for today's reading, under the header Respect for the Dead.

It's only two lines, but it contains a wealth of meaning:

“Is now the time to remind everyone,” emails KP, “that Obama’s babysitters Ayers and Dohrm dedicated their communist manifesto to Robert Kennedy’s assassin, amongst others.

The first link takes you through to a blog, Gateway Pundit, which repeats the AP news that Obama is going to deliver the eulogy at Ted Kennedy's funeral, which then allows assorted loons to squawk about the news. Shock, horror and consternation. A vile socialist orator speaking about a vile dead socialist orator.

The second link takes you to a Zombie Times piece which establishes that William Ayers at one time proclaimed communism and was involved in the writing of a Weather Underground tract Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism, which in turn - gasp - was dedicated to Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin of Robert Kennedy.

Sure the dedication sits in long rows, along with dozens of other names, including such luminaries as Micky Finn and Ja Ja Omar Kenyatta, and all the political prisoners in the United States (with only Harriet Tubman and John Brown scoring a big print tribute). When I read it, I felt a surge of relief - it seems someone else other than Ja Ja Binks got tagged with the name.

But worse still, Ayers remained a communist at the time he associated with Obama, which QED means Obama is a communist. Or at least a supporter of Sirhan Sirhan, who is Robert Kennedy's assassin.

Bob Ellis used to play this game, which is a variant on the six degrees of separation, often played with Kevin Bacon as a linchpin or a Baldwin, because they've been in so much crap, inevitably you can meet someone else involved in the crap, and thereby quickly establish a close degree of separation. The trouble is, if you play this game, what happens when you've actually met someone like Jon Voight, as I have? Suddenly the whole of Imdb falls into an intricate patten of connectivity right before your disbelieving B and C and Z grade movie loving eyes.

And of course Fred Schepisi made a movie with that title back in 1993 with a young Will Smith in one of the roles, and hey I can claim no degree of separation, because I've meet Fred Schepisi. But then I can also claim a very close degree of separation from the last three presidents of the United States, such is the laxity and the uselessness of the game these days when politicians press the flesh of thousands.

It gets more interesting if you play Bob Ellis's variant, which he used to dub sperm lines, which charted who had fucked whom, and how by following these sperm trails you might construct a vast oneiric chart of cosmic orgasmic human interconnectivity. Ellis of course liked to think that his brand of studmanship led him via these sperm trails to connect to anyone in a position of power and influence on the planet. Which shows the general uselessness of the game, unless of course you're an ego in search of a support structure.

Now the reality that Sirhan Sirhan was a Palestinian immigrant who was an Arab nationalist who was disappointed by Robert Kennedy's support for Israel in the 1967 six day war, and had nothing to do with the Weather Underground when he shot Kennedy doesn't matter in this context. Or that the Weather Underground were a bunch of quixotic loons of a left wing kind who also dedicated their tome to H. Rap Brown.

Now follow me closely here. Brown is black, and when he spoke of America as a place where violence was as natural as cherry pie, the next question is inevitably, how much difference is there between Obama's (former?) spiritual advisor the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and H. Rap Brown? None! QED Obama is a racist who hates whites. Glenn Beck tells me so.

So: the important thing is that Sirhan Sirhan leads to Ayers and Dorhm leads to Obama leads to a vast gigantic and tragic conspiracy of socialists which leads to the destruction of America, not to mention the assassination of Robert Kennedy.

You see how in just two lines you can conform to all the requirements of loon logic, and tinge the world so that you look at it through a fuzzy glass darkly? Best of all, you don't even have to get tangled up in other related conspiracy theories surrounding Robert Kennedy's assassination, such a rich stomping ground for American fruitloops, which gets the CIA involved, or a second gunman firing the fatal shot.

And of course Blair gets in his innuendo by restricting himself to the header, replete with such irony that it cries out for god to wreak vengeful justice. "Respect for the dead", it says, and you can almost imagine him standing, hand over heart, as he mourns the loss of Ted Kennedy, so shamed by the socialist Obama and his direct link to Robert Kennedy's assassin (because his baby sitter one time published a book with a part dedication to Sirhan Sirhan). He doesn't even have to use an ironic post modernist question mark to make his point. Because we loons will understand the loonacy of the world.

Well of course there's nothing you can say about such loonacy and nothing you can do about the squawking of the loons, so let's leave it at that. I won't even mention the notion that some of them are quite probably connected to Bob Ellis via sperm lines. The shock and the shame would be way too much for them.

And no, I'm not going to tell you about my sperm line connections, but I can assure you they're impeccable. They lead directly to the devil himself, which of course puts me to the left hand side of god, that wretched interfering Jesus Christ, and the shadowy, vaporous, rather timid and invisible holy ghost ... and oh, hadn't you heard? As well as being a communist socialist deviant, Obama is the anti-christ? So because of my Satanism I'm only a couple of degrees away from Obama. And I've been to Bali.

Well friend, I bring you good news about the world tomorrow. Oops, sorry, I suddenly started channeling Garner Ted Armstrong, and for the life of me I can't think why.

By the way, speaking of Obama, Slate has been running a poll as to whether he's a Nazi. You can access the strawpoll as well as get your daily Doonesbury fix by going here.

SPOILER ALERT: click on the link above first, if you haven't already voted. For those who have voted, click on the image below to see the cleverness of the strawpoll deviser, and the results from a few days ago. Now I know that in a democracy the secret ballot is everything but I have to confess that I voted for Obama being a Nazi, while noting that my peer group was Nazi, because as Jonah Goldberg keeps telling us, all liberals are fascists.

And not that I'm trying to influence you, whatever you do, don't vote for option c, or I'll send Tim Blair around to sort you out, you poncy poseur chardonnay sipping latte loving wimpy burger eating pussy footing moderate.

It's a funny old world, but where would humor be without a decent bunch of ratbag paranoid conspiracy theorists?