One thing I can never do is blindly accept what someone says just because he or she said it, or just because of who the person is, who or what the person represents, or what party or philosophy or ideology the person generally holds. That is true even in the cases of people with whom I agree on nearly everything, or even with whom I have known us to disagree on anything. (That latter would be tough; at times I disagree with myself, just to be ornery.)
That is why it drives me crazy when people hew unfailingly to a party line or to the worship of a hero, and I do not care which party or which hero. There are people who would believe President Obama if he said he was going to poop gold bars and pay off the national debt. There are others who would not accept it if he said it was Sunday and they were sitting in church. They base their reactions on the messenger instead of the message, and will deny that the impossible is impossible or the certain is certain based on whether their group or their candidate goes with that view, rather than opening their eyes and their minds to facts.
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Many things are said, many plans proposed, many ideas expounded, many facts are stated or alleged, by people of every philosophy, religion (or lack thereof), political view, nationality or race. Each should be judged on its merit. I would no more blindly accept the notions of one person or one party without reasoned analysis than I would eat something without knowing what it was or where it came from. Be it Barack Obama, George Bush, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Jesse Jackson, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Alan Colmes, Sean Hannity, Al Franken, Vladimir Putin, Pope Francis, Mother Teresa, Karl Marx, Brigham Young, John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek or Salma Hayek, I will hear their ideas and accept or reject them on their merits, NOT on who they came from, and certainly not on whether they dovetail neatly with my own preconceived ideas, as correct as those generally are. To do otherwise is to waste the most precious gifts God gave me, a mind and a will, and give them as proxy to someone else in exchange for the luxury of not having to think.
