Two people cannot communicate if all the qualifiers are put in.

If I say “To appeal to Southern white voters you have to be conservative” I could spend all day qualifying that statement.

What is “conservative” to one person is not “conservative” to another. There are hundreds or thousands of whole books dedicated to that question.

Many of the tens of millions of voters I am referring to are liberals. There are hundreds of whole books devoted to that subject.

What exactly is “white?” People get paid to write whole books quibbling over that.

But if you are in real politics, you had better understand that rule, not the quibbles.

What is a duck?

“If it quacks like a duck I call it a duck.” That’s a standard piece of common sense. But a toy can quack without being a duck.

Are you actually going to say, “I saw a quacking toy that is not a duck.”

You may think you have made a big point. But all that tells real people is that you have a lot of time and absolutely nothing to do with it.

This is a matter of seeing the trees but not the forest.

But you could argue, “The forest cannot exist without trees. He who seeth not the trees cannot understand a forest.”

Boy, that sounds wise! And I just made it up.

You can spend all day sounding wise.

There is one minor problem with spending all day with Deep Wisdom like that: You miss everything the person who said “They are not seeing the forest for the trees” is trying to tell you.

But you get to feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Lately I was talking about the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. I used the names Jacob and Esau, I think. There are so many name-pairs in the Old Testament.

What I was criticizing was a Methodist bishop about 1955 who said that if Abraham was willing to sacrifice Isaac for God, we should be willing to sacrifice the white race for God. By “God” he meant integration. I pointed out that all of us in the Bible Belt knew that God refused to accept that kind of sacrifice.

But if I mixed up Abraham and Isaac with Jacob and Esau, wasn’t my criticism absurd? I got my facts wrong just like the bishop did. Isn’t that the same thing?

Not at all. I was making a very critical point. The bishop was declaring, as a doctrine of his faith, that we had to be willing to sacrifice the white race for integration.

I was also making the point that we all knew back in 1955 that integration was aimed at the extinction of the white race.

The point I made was infinitely more important than getting the names right.

One of my commenters corrected me. I appreciated that. I would not have appreciated that if he had obsessed over it.

But if he were dumb enough to obsess over it, he wouldn’t be commenting here.

Back about 1955 a man who prided himself on his Wordly Practicality would say, “If the Greatest Thinker on earth gave a lecture with his pants unzipped, all people would remember about him would be that his pants were unzipped.”

I was just fourteen, and everybody else was impressed. But I was thinking that he hadn’t told me anything about the Greatest Thinker on earth, but he had told me a lot about himself and the people who took him seriously.

If all you notice about the Greatest Thinker on Earth ishtat he is buck naked, you have the IQ of a mushroom.

One of these days I may go back and change Jacob and Esau to Abraham and Isaac. But the fact is that I have not the slightest respect for anybody who obsesses on crap like that.

So I probably won’t bother.