More civil discourse

If we all think back eight months, to those grim January days that followed the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, the foremost political virtue that anyone on the left could name was "civil discourse." The media immediately and publicly linked the shooting to a map of "targeted districts" on Sarah Palin's facebook page, and began a drumbeat, echoed and amplified by Democratic officials, on the dangers of "political violence" resulting from "violent rhetoric." The fact that there was no evidence whatsoever to suggest that the shooter, a clearly mentally disturbed individual whose antipathy to Giffords long predated Palin's map, was even aware of Palin, her map, or anything else related to electoral politics, made no difference. The story line was the rhetoric of the right.

Some of us pointed out, at the time, that this cry for civility was both one-sided and hypocritical.

I noted that

I'm also tired of [political incivility] becoming an issue only when those on the right do it. I'd take the complaints of liberals a lot more seriously if there were a demonstrated consistency in their opposition to crude political discourse, not just using it as another partisan tool to bash conservatives.

And

In actuality, the objection to "legislating morality" turns out to be, much like the current call for "civil discourse," not a general principle, but a political weapon that the left can use to cudgel the right.

So now, having lost (or at least having the perception that they've lost) another political battle, what are we seeing and hearing from the left?

Elected Democrats:

Vice President Joe Biden joined House Democrats in lashing tea party Republicans Monday, accusing them of having “acted like terrorists” in the fight over raising the nation’s debt limit, according to several sources in the room.

Biden was agreeing with a line of argument made by Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) at a two-hour, closed-door Democratic Caucus meeting.

“We have negotiated with terrorists,” an angry Doyle said, according to sources in the room. “This small group of terrorists have made it impossible to spend any money.”

The New York Times' Joe Nocera:

You know what they say: Never negotiate with terrorists. It only encourages them.

These last few months, much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people. Their intransigent demands for deep spending cuts, coupled with their almost gleeful willingness to destroy one of America’s most invaluable assets, its full faith and credit, were incredibly irresponsible. But they didn’t care. Their goal, they believed, was worth blowing up the country for, if that’s what it took.

The New York Times' Maureen Dowd:

Tea Party budget-slashers didn’t sport the black capes with blood-red lining beloved by the campy Vincent Price or wield the tinglers deployed by William Castle. But in their feral attack on Washington, in their talent for raising goose bumps from Wall Street to Westminster, this strange, compelling and uncompromising new force epitomized “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and evoked comparisons to our most mythic creatures of the night...the Tea Party slashers roaming the corridors of the Capitol have feasted without resistance on delicious victims and will only grow bolder.

The New York Times' Thomas Friedman:

If sane Republicans do not stand up to this Hezbollah faction in their midst, the Tea Party will take the G.O.P. on a suicide mission.

(Friedman, if you recall, is the one that laments the fact that Obama doesn't have the same powers in America as the "reasonably enlightened" Chinese dictators do in China...)

Anyway, it's all par for the course. I'm going to let Jonah Goldberg finish this one up...

The Today Show even had Debbie Wasserman Schultz on this morning for five minutes talking about Giffords. No one thought to ask her what she thought of Biden’s comments? It’s not like she’s the Democratic party’s national spokesperson or anything. Oh, wait. She is!

Instead, after the full ten minutes on Giffords, we get an update about the debt-limit situation (which is supposedly an Armageddon-level issue) and Kelly O’Donnell basically carries water for Biden on the issue by completely muddying whether he said anything of the sort at all. (His office says, no, no the vice president didn’t call them terrorists, he just politely agreed with all the Democratic congressmen in the room that they “acted like terrorists.” Ah, this is a distinction a team of a million Jesuits working around the clock would have a hard time slicing.)

And yet you know the next time there’s the slightest, remotely exploitable tragedy or hint of violence, the same reporters, editors, producers, and politicians are going to insist that blood was spilled because of the right wing’s rhetoric.

Well, go to Hell. All of you.

Hindsight

Kathryn Jean Lopez notes a change - finally! - in (highly paid New York Times columnist/Chi-Com Dictatorship cheerleader) Tom Friedman's tune on Iraq:

Thomas Friedman today:

Former President George W. Bush’s gut instinct that this region craved and needed democracy was always right. It should have and could have been pursued with much better planning and execution. This war has been extraordinarily painful and costly. But democracy was never going to have a virgin birth in a place like Iraq, which has never known any such thing.

Thomas Friedman in 2006:

It is now obvious that we are not midwifing democracy in Iraq. We are baby-sitting a civil war.

...

leaving, while bringing other problems, might also make it easier to build coalitions to deal with post-U.S. Iraq, Iran, Hezbollah and Syria.

Yes, hindsight's 20-20. But that doesn't mean that it wasn't possible to see that Friedman was wrong in 2006, as he's wrong about so much today. For example, here's some of what I was saying about Iraq in 2005:

2 1/2 years ago, Saddam Hussein was in power in Baghdad. He was paying the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. He was providing a haven for some Al-quaeda members. He was shooting at US and British planes that were enforcing the UN no-fly zones. He had the largest army in the middle-east. He was taking UN Oil-for-Food money and preventing aid in the form of food and medicine from reaching his oppressed citizens. Now he's gone, his armies are gone, his sons are gone and the Iraqi people have elected a representative government that's making progress towards a democratic constitution. The influence of the actions in Iraq has caused changes in behavior - positive changes of behavior - in Syria and Lebanon and Libya. On the day after that ridiculous comment, the New York Times, Bush administration mouthpiece, carries a front-page story that starts "Iraqi leaders moved to the brink of agreement on a new constitution on Sunday, solving several contentious issues..." And Hagel's got the nerve to go on the air yesterday and compare Iraq to Vietnam and say that "we're not winning."

and 2006:

The fact is that the "major campaigning" in Iraq lasted about 8 weeks. At which point in time, the country needed to be rebuilt. That's the exercise we've been involved in for the last 3 years. Has it been different than what I, or anyone else expected?

Welcome to reality.

...

If you'd told me 3 1/2 years ago that in the spring of 2006, Iraq would have held democratic elections, Afghanistan would have held democratic elections, there would not have been another attack on American soil because we're killing the terrorists over there instead of dealing with them over here, and that the American military death toll in Aghanistan and Iraq combined would not yet have reached the official New York death toll for 9/11, would I have supported that? The answer to that is not only "yeah," it's "hell, yeah!"

This really wasn't a hard call. But there were people like Friedman so blinded by their ideological response to George W. Bush that they weren't able to see it.

Quote chain

I've got little to add to this...

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.

- George Orwell

Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy.

- John Derbyshire

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.

- Thomas Friedman

Of course, we all remember those Friedman columns longing for the party in power to be able to unilaterally impose its "politically difficult by critically important policies" during the Bush administration.

Oh, you don't remember those?

Hmm... Come to think of it, neither do I. Well, when the space ants come, I'm sure that Thomas will welcome our new insect overlords, and be happy to help them round up others to toil in their underground sugar caves. As long as they're Democrats. Or Communists. Or at least not Republicans...



(The Friedman column also contains this howler: "Mr. Obama is not a socialist; he’s a centrist." Yes, a centrist who has taken over the banking and auto industries and is gunning for the health care system. A centrist who has appointed 31 different czars to Cabinet-level duties in such a way that they don't need Congressional approval, including avowed Communist and 911 "Truther" Van Jones. A centrist whose first major piece of legislation was a $750 Billion grab-bag for leftist special interest groups which has provided no stimulus whatsoever to the economy. A centrist who wants to redistribute the wealth, who jokingly threatened to have a college audited, and less-jokingly threatened to allow mobs to attack bankers. That kind of centrist. It's no wonder the people at the Times think that moderates are arch-conservatives if they think that Obama's a centrist.)

UPDATE: Thanks, Jonah, for linking. Welcome newcomers - feel free to take a look around. I've got a bunch of Obama stuff, a lot of linking but some original analysis. I write a lot about the Boston Red Sox, as well, and whatever happens to come up that inspires me...