To anyone whose head isn’t so firmly planted up their most beloved sacred cow’s butt, it has long been obvious that every side in politics has its nutjobs. Few can rock as well as Ted Nugent, but that doesn’t make him less insane.

And that’s just the start of it. When attacked for his rabid anti-Semitism, Nugent doubled quadrupled down.

“Just when you hope that mankind couldnt possibly get any dumber or more dishonest, superFreaks rise to the occasion. What sort of racist prejudiced (piece of shit) could possibly not know that Jews for guncontrol are nazis in disguise? “NEVER AGAIN!” Anyone? Anyone?? (Are you fucking kidding me?)”

Plus (he was on a roll):

“The NEVER AGAIN battlecry was universally embraced by all good people who will make sure another Holocaust never happens again. Freaks have plummeted to whole new low. Plummet on punks. Plummet on. Meanwhile I adjust my yamika at my barmitzva playing my kosher guitar. My dad killed nazis & saved Jews in WWII. Eat me.”

Before you get all outraged (or lack the impulse control needed to prevent you from coming to his defense), the first few comments at Turley’s blog defend Nugent. Is this free speech? Of course it is. Batshit crazy free speech, but that’s what free speech is all about. Do the people in there support gun control? They do. Are they Jewish? I guess, not having personally checked their bona fides, but it’s not worth disputing.

Does that mean Nugent’s got a point? Are you an idiot? Of course not. He’s friggin’ nuts. There are sound arguments to be had for both sides of the issue. Nugent’s argument reflects none of them. But then, it’s acceptable to point that out, because Nugent isn’t a delicate flower who needs to be protected from criticism.

The Nugent approach, however, is the flip side of so many arguments being made by progressives, one of the latest being Madeleine Albright’s “special place in hell” for women who don’t support a woman running for president, or Gloria Steinem’s horny girls who want Berniebros.

I’m still trying to get my head around that — and around Gloria Steinem’s breathtakingly demeaning assertion that young women who back Bernie Sanders are in thrall to pheromones, not ideas or idealism, and angling to score dates with the young bucks in the Sanders brigade.

That’s right, “democratic socialism” is a known aphrodisiac: the oyster of politics. There’s nothing like denunciations of oligarchs to put you in the mood.

Albright and Steinem aren’t nearly as crazy as Nugent? Perhaps, but that doesn’t change the fallacy of their arguments. We’re deluged with “arguments” that range from the merely fallacious to the outright crazy, all reflecting a common theme. People are so passionately dedicated to their cause that they refuse to see the irrationality of their arguments or the arguments of others that end with their favored outcome.

The “end justifies the means” is either totally right or totally wrong, depending on whether you agree with the end.  When you agree, it’s totally different than the other guy playing the same game with reason, because you’re RIGHT!!! and he’s WRONG!!!

And when this is pointed out, the Ted Nugent in all of us emerges in otherwise rational people.

They hate freedom, they hate good over evil . . . Tell every you know how evil they are. Let us raise maximum hell to shut them down!”

That could pretty much come out of the mouth of any deeply passionate partisan, whether feminist, SJW, racist or misogynist.  The word “facile” is used often to describe the indulgence in empty rhetoric, and just as quickly rejected because they are on the side of truth and justice, thus making their reductivist view of good and evil valid.

The next step is a demand to prove them wrong, which is a waste of time since one can’t disprove feelings and the effort to explain is an order of magnitude greater than the ability to spew nonsense.  It’s usually not worth the effort, particularly when it involves a host of baseless and self-serving assumptions, each of which fails but the totality of which would require a lengthy discussion to dispel.  Just because someone is in touch with their inner Ted Nugent doesn’t mean they’re entitled to be taken seriously.

If we rip Albright a new one for her dive down the feminist rabbit hole, that genitalia demand one vote for a person with similar genitalia, then we open ourselves to the charge of being misogynists, because we just don’t get it.  If we rip Ted Nugent a new one for turning gun control into a Jewish conspiracy, then we’re Second Amendment haters who would succumb to the control of the Trilateral Commission. Well, maybe not exactly, but you get the point.

We are traitors to the cause if we don’t back anyone and any argument that supports our desired goal.  Stupid? False? Friggin’ crazy? So what?  Isn’t the eradication of campus rape, revenge porn, bullying, gun deaths, police abuse, whatever you hold as evil in your heart, important enough to eschew reason if it achieves a critical goal?

Then again, whoever sees it the other way is saying the same thing.

Or we can try thinking. We can reject the stupid, the false, the crazy, even when it backs up our desired goal. We can refuse to rely on false statistics, empty rhetoric, logical fallacies, even when we figure we can sneak them through because people are just too frigging stupid to realize that they were just played for fools.

To elevate the level of discourse means that you have to tell the people on your team who are in touch with their inner Ted Nugent that they’re kooby shooby. Don’t be surprised that they call you names and throw you off the team for being disloyal to the cause.  That’s just what stupid people and flaming nutjobs do.