Ah yes--Rumpole’s strategy, you say. The dimestore cliché of the intellectually cornered: “Can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.” You cling to that line like a security blanket, as if recycling an old barroom sneer somehow absolves you from having to engage with the actual substance. But let me offer you a kindness: that line doesn’t elevate you. It reveals you.
When you invoke that very old, very tired trope, what you’re really saying is, “I can’t rebut the facts, so I’ll pretend the facts are performance.” You’re not analyzing; you’re retreating--into cynicism, into deflection, into the stale air of secondhand slogans. Because the moment the citations emerged--the federal statutes, the Supreme Court rulings, the founding documents themselves--you lost your footing. So now you mumble about “bullshit” like a man who’s wandered into a library with a bullhorn and resents the silence.
But here's the truth you can't spin into a meme: you didn’t get baffled because someone was trying to confuse you. You got baffled because you walked into the room unarmed, swinging platitudes in a gunfight of facts. And now you lash out at the light for exposing how little you brought with you, how little you know, even how little you are capable of knowing.
So no, this wasn’t smoke and mirrors. It was just a mirror. And what you saw in it wasn’t brilliance or bullshit--it was yourself, outmatched, unprepared, and flinging an unoriginal not-so-pithy aphorism as if that passed for insight.
So, unless you are a glutton for humiliation, I'd suggest you take your leave...while you still have the illusion of dignity intact. I promise you will be forgotten.