THAT'S A GREAT TITLE! NO, IT ISN'T YOU DUMB BITCH!

One of the greatest debates that permeated the annals of history was, of course, Abraham Lincoln vs. Stephen Douglas. It was a series of seven debates where then Republican Lincoln was battling incumbent Illinois democrat senator Stehpen Douglas for the Illinois seat in the U.S. Senate. Lincoln ultimately did not win the seat, but these highly publicized debates help secure his spot in the 1860 election. The debates were an oratory masterpiece that showed intelligence and well documented research to successfully shown two sides of the dangerous coin known as slavery. It was smart and helped careers. At no time during this debate did Lincoln call Douglas's mother a whore nor did Douglas call Lincoln a tall shit-eating butt pirate.

I bring this debate up because I was involved in what is best described as the modern venue for debates, an internet message board. I've never really gotten involved with one of these things, I have heard tales of hardship and great pain as people use it as a forum to spout out words of hate and call various dissidents faggots. But I felt it was something that could have a reasonable debate over the merits of comedy and free speech. I am talking of the Sarah Palin/David Letterman feud. Now, full disclosure, I don't care for Sarah Palin. She seems to be the exact opposite of what the Republican party should be throwing there hopes and dreams upon. I also don't think Letterman is funny or even relevant anymore. Ever since the Academy Award Uma/Oprah fiasco, I haven't really been on board. Not saying I like Leno, or even Jimmy Kimmel. Talk shows tend to bore me. I will always turn off the Daily Show when Jon Stewart gets to a-interviewin'. These are two people who have seen the spotlight start to go down and suddenly, a random joke throws a bright sun on their celebrity, and both sides ran with it as a grab to get ratings and attention. Pure and simple.

Thus, I got involved online because I felt that it was a silly debate that was open and shut. The joke, at its basest level, said that Palin's visit to the Yankee game got a little uncomfortable when during the seven inning stretch, Palin's daughter got knocked up by A-Rod. A reasonably funny joke if you understood that the joke was about Bristol. But, Sarah, in a masterstroke of marketing, quickly decried the joke was about Willow and caused a pointless firestorm. The thread was calling for Letterman to be fired, while the other side was calling for Palin to just go away. I got involved, mainly because I saw it as an attack on comedy, something I love dearly.

Now, this is all set up. I don't want to debate the merits of either side for this piece. I want to get into what truly upset me about this debate on this thread which took an embarrassing week out of my time. It started out with me making statements to show how Palin and Letterman was using this media storm to get some needed attention. I didn't feel either side really cared that much about the issue. I thought the joke was funny and that I clearly knew that it was Bristol and not Willow that was the brunt of the joke. Actually, for all technical purposes, A-Rod was the brunt of that joke but since he didn't come out protesting, I chose to not focus on him. Someone sarcastically (I assume it was, hard to tell with just text on a screen) made the comment that they assumed that I am so great and that they hoped no one dragged my good name through the mud with jokes about you in public. And then, I made the worse possible response. I said, "I'm a comedian, I would love anyone to be talking about me in public." The next three comments where "Well, maybe if you were funny, people would talk about you." Now, seeing as how I never used my full name, just some initials, I thought that it was a bit ridiculous that people had made a fair assessment of my act. So, I asked, "How do you know if I'm funny or not." I received several more comments (all from people on the thread with an opposing point of view on the matter) that I wasn't funny in any of my comments. I called that thinking ridiculous as I was having a serious debate and wasn't using the medium to tell jokes. Thus, by that thinking, if I had said I was a doctor, no one would think I was a good doctor because I didn't ask anyone to cough in my thread. Response from that comment. Zero.

I was appalled but then I realized that I could've been funny, and it wouldn't have mattered. The only proper response to logic and reason is emotion and ridicule. I'm not saying my way of thinking is the right way of thinking. I'm just saying that I wasn't going to insult you as my way of arguing a point. But as I continued on with the discussion, people threw insults at me as if that proved their points. I was a liar, an idiot, a retard, a baby raper, and my personal favorite, a liberal degenerate who would sell his mother to Iraq for some good hashish. Now, my character ended up getting attacked for no other reason that I had an opposing viewpoint. What? And it wasn't like the other side couldn't get some good points in if they wanted to. I actually started to argue with myself. If I made a point, I showed how the opposing point could've responded, with no character attacks. I ended up helping the other side, but alas neither of my sides were read too much, mainly because I never once used the word douchebag. I stated that you've lost the argument once you've insulted me. This led to more insults. Cocksucker (though to be honest it was C**ksucker, don't want any profanity on this thread), faggot, dirtface, socialist, and a Christian Conservative even blamed my disbelief in God as reason for my hatred and lack of being open about other people's ideas. Not to mention the multitude of times I was called an idiot. At one point, I had to explain why Obama's health care plan was not an impeachable offense. Why David Letterman was not a pervy old man who wants to rape as many children that he could get his claws on to? And how a joke is exaggeration with a little bit of truth, but alas not the 100% truth?

And it's not the people's fault. If you look toward the Rush Limbaugh's, the Bill O'Reilly's, the Keith Olbermann's, the Al Franken's. Insults have replaced ideas and themes. Because insults make money, not prove to be great argumentative tools. And the masses are fooled into thinking that Bill or Al or Keith actually care about us. And therefore if it works for them, hey, it could work for us. The insult as argument just doesn't hold water. And the fact is that this idea of being heard by being the loudest and the meanest is downright scary. We won't care about facts or truth, we just want the bitch fight.

The only thing that was cool from this thing was that one of the opposing viewpoints chided another poster that was on his side. The poster called me a retard and the other guy said, "Hey, there's no reason for personal attacks." It made me think I made a little ripple of change within comments about Obama not being a natural born citizen and comments about how Todd Palin eats babies.

I believe there was a time when we were smart. As a people, I think that we took things at face value and understood the difference between truth and fiction. But then again, I believe those times because of what I've seen in historical epics. So, perhaps we have always been collective idiots. It's just now, thanks to the internet, those voices get heard rapidly without need for thought or reference. After all, everyone was just throwing out facts willy nilly on the thread, even though it was obvious that we were on the internet and all we had to do was look it up. (Which I did several times, including learning that Willow wasn't even at the Yankee game despite Sarah Palin saying she was.) And because fact checking can happen so quickly, the made up stuff is still thrown out there without any regard to being called out. One guy said that he thought it was a joke about Willow because he knew Willow was at the ball game. When another threader started posting links to articles all over the internet that never said she was there, the original poster started posting his own articles he found. Articles that confirmed that Willow was in New York, but not at the Yankee game. I said, "Maybe you could say that you knew Willow was in New York so you assumed she went to the Yankee game." The guy on my side even said, "Hey, that's a reasonable response, I'd buy that." But instead the guy said, I saw a picture of her there. No picture was found. When photos of Sarah at the game sans Willow were linked, he said he saw the picture on the View. When said View show was linked without the picture, he said he probably saw it on Regis. By then, we had given up. Or maybe that's the point, to cause people to just give up on arguing. If that's true, then perhaps it is a valid arguing point. It's the 21st century filibuster.

Then, I realized that nobody's mind was going to be changed. No one was arguing for the purpose of bringing people to their side, no one really on the fence. We were just trying to shout above the din. And by this time, Dave had apologized to Sarah and they had moved on. The feud was over, but we continued to spend time out of our lives to argue a dead issue. And then I made my first real insult attack. "Perhaps," I wrote, "perhaps we are all the idiots."