“At
a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized, at a time
when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world
at the feet of those who think differently than we do, it’s important
for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each
other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.”
By Noah Rothman
These were the words spoken by President Barack Obama
on January 12, 2011. Days earlier, a mentally disturbed individual shot
18 people, killing six, in front of a Safeway in Tucson, Arizona. Among
the killer’s victims was a gravely wounded Democratic Congresswoman.
The event prompted a flurry of calls for moderation and
appeals to sanity from the press – appeals primarily directed at
recently ascendant tea party conservatives. They were blamed
irrationally and erroneously for the sharp rise in partisan rhetoric
which, along with the so-called martial metaphors that have been
associated with politics since the Greek city-states began to experiment
with popular democracy, supposedly led to this act of senseless
violence.
Obama’s speech at the Tucson memorial ceremony was among the best he
had ever given up to that point. It remains a triumph. The president
spoke precisely to the moment. It soothed the nerves of Obama’s wounded
and defensive supporters and grounded conservatives still seething after
a heated midterm campaign season. The only problem with that speech was
that it was entirely dishonest. Obama merely produced a disingenuous
and perfunctory nod toward the comity for which so many hand-wringing
Beltway reporters and editorial writers were clamoring.
At the time, Obama still believed he had the wind at his back. In
spite of the political setbacks of 2010, the president thought he could
govern and continue to pursue the sweeping reform agenda of which his
recently passed health care reform law was only the first step. But as
the president’s political prospects have dwindled, so have his and his
supporters rhetorical appeals to rabid partisanship increased.
The Washington D.C. columnists are silent. Their once paramount desire for civility has disappeared.
This is somewhat due to the fact that so many in the Acela Corridor media establishment agree with the White House’s aims and mischaracterizations of their opponents motives.
But it is also partly due to simply having become inured to the White
House’s regular rhetorical overreach. The American public, too, has
become accustomed to the Obama administration vilifying its political
opponents in ways that would have horrified many just three short years
ago.
“What we’re not for is negotiating with people with a bomb strapped to their chest,” said Dan Pfeiffer, the White House advisor for strategic communications – let that sink in, strategic communications — on CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper on Thursday.
“It’s a negotiation if I’m trying to sell you my house and we are
debating the price of it,” he added. “It is not a negotiation if I show
up at your house and say, ‘Give me everything inside or I’m going to
burn it down.’”
Pfeiffer did not even flinch while comparing the president’s
political opponents to suicide bombers and arsonists. For those unclear
as to why this is abominable and excessive language for a representative
of the White House to use, follow this link to see what suicide bombers do to people. The fruits of their evil work are far too graphic to reproduce here.
But this offense merited hardly a peep from the Beltway set that once
rent garments over the excesses of the tea party and the threat their
discourse presented to American self-governance. Why? Perhaps because
they are acclimated to this administration’s all-too-common practice of
linking their opponents to violent and deranged criminals.
This is the White House staffed by campaign professionals who thought it a valiant and effective tactic to imply that Mitt Romney was complicit in a criminally negligent homicide.
When a noble few expressed their exception to this latest example of
the Obama campaign’s overreach, his advisors tried to say that it was
merely an overzealous and unaffiliated group which had run the offending
ad. Only later did audio of Deputy Campaign Manager Stephanie Cutter (now a CNN host) surface demonstrating that the highest levels of the campaign had orchestrated the attack.
This is an administration which does not see a problem with Joe Biden, the Vice President of the United States, calling the White House’s Republican opponents in Congress “the Neanderthal crowd.”
Indeed, nobody in the press really did either. Those who did not
expressly agree with this characterization of the GOP were unmoved to
protest it because it is simply par for the course for this
administration.
In 2011, the last time the Obama administration had to contend with
the irritating task of actually negotiating with their opponents over
the nation’s escalating debt, Biden was also implicated in an episode of
rhetorical overreach. The White House’s regular insistence that
Republicans were holding the nation’s economy “hostage” in order to
limit the unsustainable explosion of federal spending had resulted in
one Democrat in Congress taking this line of attack to its logical
conclusion. He said that Republicans in Congress had “acted like
terrorists.”
The event occurred in a closed-door meeting, the details of which
somehow leaked out into the press. Biden reportedly agreed with this
characterization and was hounded by the press to explain this infraction.
The Vice President enthusiastically insisted that he had never agreed
with this inflammatory characterization of America’s Republican
representatives in Congress. To call the majority party in the U.S.
House of Representatives was, at that time, a violation of agreed norms
of civil behavior.
Where is the press today asking if Pfeiffer’s statement represents
the views of the president? Where are the thought leaders disturbed by
the trajectory of American political discourse? What has changed so
dramatically in the two and a half years since Biden’s last
transgression merited such blowback from the press? The answer is quite
simply that the shock value of such comments has worn off. They are now
the commonplace attacks on this administration’s political opponents.
Obama was correct in his 2011 Tucson address – an address which
touched on themes he clearly did not believe but felt obliged to express
– that sharply partisan rancor and demonization of those with divergent
political values is deleterious to the relative harmony which keeps a
republic functioning.
It is true that American history is punctuated with periods in which
partisan politicians hammer their political foes with withering verbal
assaults. The republic has survived and it will continue to endure long
after Obama has left the White House. But the Democrats latest series of
rhetorical offenses against comity have demonstrated something rather
important: the media does not really care about excessive partisanship,
acrimony, or incitement in politics. At least, they don’t care when it
is directed at Republicans.
Islamists? Man-made disasters.
Bill Ayers? Folk Hero.
Mumia abu Jamal? Railroaded by 'The Man.'
Elected officials? Terrorists.
I just wish every fucking Progressive would die already. I'd even be satisfied with painless exits at this point.
Fuck, Fuck, Fuck Them All!
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