Who cares about Mitt Romney's taxes? Lefties are brilliant at deploying irrelevance as a weapon

I first became aware of the Left’s penchant for deploying ridiculously irrelevant arguments when, as a 16-year old, I read my first political book – Paul Foot’s The Rise of Enoch Powell: An Examination of Enoch Powell’s Attitude to Immigration and Race, (1969). If memory serves me correctly, several pages of this tome were devoted to highlighting the fact that Powell sometimes used the same language as the fascist National Front – ergo Powell was a fascist. Job done! Politician smeared. No more argument needed. Open the floodgates!

I remember almost being convinced by this and (for some odd reason) tried the Powell argument out on my mum. “You see, Enoch Powell uses ‘England’s green and pleasant land’ a lot – and so does the National Front!”

“That,” she replied, “is the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard. Everyone uses that phrase. Why would that make him a fascist?”

In that instant, I saw through all of Foot’s bullshit (they're sometimes really handy, parents). I read on, suddenly able to see what a pile of intellectually bankrupt, tendentious, juvenile nonsense it actually was.

And, of course, I've spent much of the last 40-odd years listening to similar kindergarten-level political arguments, almost invariably deployed by the Left – mainly, one presumes, because they realise that actually discussing issues would reveal them to be bereft of answers.

The main current example is provided by Obama’s campaign team. Just what, in the name of all that’s holy, does the amount of tax paid by Mitt Romney have to do with his ability to turn around a flatlining US economy compared to the chances of an incumbent president whose deranged socialist spending spree has done nothing but increase the Everest of debt future generations will be struggling to pay off?  Why should Romney’s former business activities – yeah, he made money, sue him – have more of a bearing on how people vote than the actual record of the communist who has been destroying the country for the past three and a half years?

But it provides a perfect example of the standard, dishonest left-wing approach to covering up their own demonstrable failures (or straightforward wrong-doings).

A prime variant of the argumentum ad irreleventum (or whatever it’s called) is the one where the leftist responds to an attack by homing in on one almost entirely irrelevant detail contained in the original charge – and turning that into the substantive issue. (Tony Blair’s press secretary was Alastair Campbell was a master of this ploy.)

I’m reading M. Stanton Evans’s masterful Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies, which contains several examples of the trick. When McCarthy claimed in a speech at Wheeling, West Virginia in February 1950 that he had a list of known communists working for the State Department (i.e. America’s Foreign Office) the liberal media and Democrat politicians turned the whole thing into a row about numbers. They claimed McCarthy had used the figure 205, while he maintained he’d said 57. (The evidence would suggest McCarthy was correct – he certainly used the 205 figure in other contexts, but never claimed they were names on a list.)

Of course, the numbers were almost entirely irrelevant. What mattered was that there actually were a whole bunch of known commies working for the State Department, influencing US policy in favour of vile communist tyrants.  Why the hell hadn’t all these skunks been fired and, in some cases, tried for treason? From that point on, though, the argument became all about which number Joe McCarthy had used in one speech.

The Left are really good at this sort of profoundly dishonest stuff, which is one of the many reasons why I despise them.