One of my longstanding pet peeves is the right’s use of the "incivility" canard to attack progressives. They latched onto this one metric – use of swear words – as some kind of bogus proxy for Basic Human Decency, because it was the only measure by which they come out ahead. But now Michael Gerson has gone beyond even that flimsy dodge, and simply hones in on liberal/Democratic incivility to the exclusion of all else:
The first response to the performer on a public stage wishing the death of a stranger for political reasons was discomfort. Wanda Sykes had "crossed a line" at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in accusing Rush Limbaugh of terrorism and treason, mocking his past drug addiction and wishing his kidneys would fail.
(…)
The practitioners of the rant have their own television shows, radio programs and Web sites. And now it seems they will have their own elected representative, the author of "Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot." Al Franken has made a career of such rants, supposedly asking "Isn’t Cardinal O’Connor an [expletive]?" calling opponents "human filth" and suggesting that his next book might bear the title: "I [expletive] Hate Those Right-Wing Mother [expletives]!"
(…)
Rudeness sets out to dominate and humiliate…. Verbal violence can leave people smarting for days, or scarred for years, or pushed like a vulnerable middle-schooler toward suicide…. Why does politics seem to numb this rudimentary moral sense?
Yes, that’s all well and good, very high-minded – but why single out Sykes and Franken? What about the leader of the Republican Party who spews hate on his radio show every single day, who once told a black caller to "take that bone out of your nose and call me back" and mused about how "all composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson"? What about Michael Savage, who once told a gay caller he should "get AIDS and die"? What about Ann Coulter, who called John Edwards a faggot, and the 9/11 widows witches and harpies? Aren’t they, y’know, maybe just the tiniest bit uncivil?
(In fairness, Gerson does say that "some spotlight-chasing conservatives… attack opponents as ‘traitors’ and… employ racist epithets." And, um, that’s it.)
Wanda Sykes got a national platform for one night and said mean things about Rush that pale in comparison to what he says on the air every day. Al Franken retired from the liberal comedian business two years ago and once wrote mean things about Rush that pale in comparison to what he says on the air every day. Neither have ever had anywhere near the audience and platform of their poor, hapless victim, and yet they’re Gerson’s poster children for the coarseness of our discourse.
Honestly, were they really the only examples of political incivility Gerson could think of? Is he such an abject dittohead that only incivility directed at Rush bothers him?
Related posts:
Spotlight
Support this site!
Subscribe to the newsletter
Advertise on Firedoglake
Send
us your tips
Make us your homepage
About Firedoglake
Advanced search
Hysterical incivility has been the Wingnut stock-in-trade for years. Viagra Oxycontin calls it “Excellence in Broadcasting”. I call it “Excrement in Broadcasting”.
Did Gerson just wake up again? Or did he catch this between naps at the American Enterprise Institute?
I actually meant it as “hysterical blindness to incivility”, but I guess it works either way.
I guess it’s difficult to see your own ass if your head is already way up there.
Oh, fuck Gerson and the cross he rode in on.
Wow! And an action shot of the White House Press Pool Stenography Society meeting during the Bush Syndicate’s time in office. Isn’t that Judy Miller and Ceci Connelly in the front-row center? LOL…
It’s the oldest Republican Country Club ploy in the world — anyone who is considering threatening to their game (read anyone who is remotely intelligent & reasonable) is too “rude” to engage in the conversation. What is bizarre is that it still works (see party, Democratic and media, American mainstream.)
Repubs have had the EXACT same schtick for decades now, and we know EXACTLY how BigMedia will amplify their schtick and feign outrage over the “incivility,” just as they’re instructed.
I do wish Liberals would think ahead a little more often knowing this dynamic will happen…guaranteed.
So, Sykes could’ve made a joke about Limpbaugh caught on a private jet with four grown men going to the Dominican Republic, a world leader in sex trades, with viles full V#agra. Now your average American cannot relate to this whatsoever. It is the perfect thing to bring up over and over again, and do not let them distract off this topic.
However, most people have personal experience, either personally or friends/family, with addictions and a serious medical condition like kidney failure. Would the usual BigMedia mavens be rushing to defend Lush if the issue was private jet travels to DR with ED pills? I think not. Think, people!
Same with O’Loofah. Don’t get distracted. Just simply bring up the Andrea Mackris transcript and nothing else. He explicitly talks about cheating on his wife in Italy, and harasses his co-worker repeatedly with talk about using vibrators on himself, falafel and loofahs on her, among other things. Who’s going to defend this?
Repubs number one strategy is to change the subject when they know their side is indefensible. Liberals so often let them get away with it. Focus. Less is more!
Oh Noes! They are fainting in the newsrooms because of progressive incivilities!
To quote myself responding to some conservative wanker comparing the “profanity quotient” of liberal vs. conservative blogs:
Was is it “civil” for the Vice President of United States to say, “Go fuck yourself,” to a US Senator on the floor of the Senate, like Dick Cheney did? Don’t remember the BigMedia yakkers getting too worked up about that…
But of course, we know that their real job is to provide cover for BigMoney brokers in government (so they keep getting elected), so these same BigMedia mavens keep their jobs and even get promoted frequently, despite no evidence whatsoever that they help “ratings.” In fact, evidence suggests these same names that have dominated the punditry for decades, actually hurt ratings, since readership/viewers have been consistently going down overall. Yet, no changes made virtually at all in the punditocracy. Go figure.
Funny that he only appears to take exception to the title of Franken’s book. Does that mean he agrees that the text of the book is accurate?
They call shit poo and torture enhanced interrogation.
Absolutely. It’s fine and dandy to torture people if you’re Republican and I can’t think of anything less civil than that. Now, if Leahy had told Cheney to go fuck himself all hell would have broken loose.
Try requesting they share their memorable photos of torture.
But really, can a person who goes around speaking endlessly of “fricking” expect to be taken seriously?
On a tangentially related note, who would win a clown-off between Michael Steele and Bill Kristol?
To borrow a line from the first National Lampoon’s “Vacation”, they NEED those photos. They USE them a lot…
In context of the kool-aid drinking torture apologists, these monsters among us accusing others of “incivlity” no longer deserve air time for their predictable rants and hissy fits, but the morally myopic media can not grasp this. And so these hypocrits or obtuse lemmings will cherry-pick the slings and arrows that offend them, the MSM echoing the toxic drumbeats, so that the puffed up hate-indignation will be picked up by even more lemmings. Meanwhile, those bloviating right wingers AND THEIR FOLLOWERS have/are destroying or enabling the destroyers (which is just as culpable) to destroy the welfare and security of this country. And their levels of denial to any responsibility for the wreckage thus far seem to have taken on exponential proportions! Minimizing torture and the horror of that is mind-numbing to witness and fathom for those with a conscience.
ELI!
What about Supreme Court Justice Vaffancul? Oh, I forgot, he was just scratching his chin. Marcy recently did a related post “fighting about fuck”.
http://emptywheel.firedoglake……bout-fuck/
I can sort of give Scalia and Cheney a pass, since Gerson is ostensibly talking about commentary, but… yeah, civility fail.
You must agree that Republicans are experts on the subject of obscenity. They have said all the words and done all the deeds that would be described as obscene.
No argument here. Republicans accusing anyone else of incivility is the height of hilarity and hypocrisy.
fuck em
Was is it “civil” for the Vice President of United States to say, “Go fuck yourself,” to a US Senator on the floor of the Senate, like Dick Cheney did?
clearly covered, cleared and extolled in the Chapter 1 of “Fourth-Branch Sorta-Executive Privilege”.
Funny ’cause it’s true.
Message to Gerson: Bite me and I mean that in the most civil way possible.
These guys are way past running even on the fumes. But it goes to show what a stranglehold wingnuttia has on the media that every Republican talking point has its day there whereas those of us who talk about real workable solutions to problems like the economy and finance system seldom make it into the media at all.
Yes. This has been another installment…
I once had an extensive email conversation with a right-winger. Here he is in an exchange in our local paper with another right-winger:
In response to a Inky piece about the Army Experience Center, we get comments like:
Posted by ark 06:00 PM, 05/14/2009
I can envision one day the use of real people as targets. The protesters, code pink, ACORN, MADD. Well, one can dream can’t he!
followed by:
Posted by steimel 08:27 PM, 05/14/2009
ARK, I share your dream.
shortly before that:
Posted by steimel 08:25 PM, 05/14/2009
Do you protestors ever take the time to protest a cop killer, or a video game? … Its about your hate for the armed services of the USA.
Erm, okay. We peacenik lefties are the ones consumed by hate. Right. Sure. Okay.
This is a fellow who was ragging on me for being a blind follower of Saul Alinsky (Whom I had first heard of about a month earlier) and who was awful because I thought GW Bush was a criminal! I mean WTF?!?!?
Why are you so intolerant of homicidal sociopaths?
Then of course, there’s Charlie Daniels.
Of course it wasn’t!
I am aware of the Wanda Sykes comedy monologue. I enjoyed the hell out of it, I think Wanda Sykes is very honest and I don’t blame anyone for standing up for her integrity.
From WaPo’s current front page:
And I’m sure she felt much better afterwards for having expressed herself.
Oh that liberal media…
I’m not much of a Pelosi fan, but Republicans accusing Democrats of dishonesty is almost as rich as when they accuse them of incivility.
bunch o original thinkers.
Of course, silly. There’s nothing more important right now than what Nancy Pelosi hear many years ago about something she had no control over. Nothing whatsoever. Certainly should be frontpage and lead stories, since there’s nothing else going on.
I’m sure the fact that this is dominating every BigMedia outlet right now is purely coincidence.
It really is jaw-dropping fun that the “Uncivility” charge comes from those who wear Rushboy as the face and mouth of their party!!! Can it get any richer than that. Have they complained about Feminazi or Nakita Dean? SO?
This ELI thread is so over.
*Sigh*! Yeah, I know. I really gotta work on my terribly intolerant incivility.
You’re right….Next. Late Night Y’all
The Rethuglicans have been reduced to talking to themselves, like a drunk on a park bench. There was a time during the Clinton years when they were reaching a broader audience; that audience has no shrunk down to a very tiny echo box. Now that Bukckley’s dead, they can’t pull off the supercilious; what’s left now is just a bunch of buffoons. Thekky got nothing, and it is killing them.
Message to Gerson: Go Cheney yourself.
Supposedly? Hasn’t Mike learned how to use The Google?
Unlike bleeping torture which doesn’t apparently do bleeping diddly-squat to nobody because we did it to our own soldiers under totally different conditions when they could stop and had safe words. Not to mention that bleeping torture is absolutely essential for our Republic to survive because there are bleep-bleep ticking bleeping time bombs everywhere. Except, of course, that we had to absolutely stop using torture because people found out we were using torture and if they ever found out the true nature of what we were doing or heaven forfend saw what we’d done, our troops would be in danger. Sweet Jeebus. Of course, the incivility of normally rational people in the face of such bleeping bleepity immorality, evil, and just plain nonsensical stupidity is going to go up – it’s a wonder every other bleeping word tha rational people say isn’t incivil in the face of such an onslaught. Michael Gerson is a bleep bleep bleeping bleepwad!
Of course they’re complaining about swear words or passing references to hypothetical kidney failure–what else are they going to talk about? How worthwhile their ideas have proved to be over the last 8 years? How they actually have any ideas–other than panty-sniffing and how much they hate liberals?
If their positions could be supported by any arguments of substance, they’d use those arguments. This blather over trivialities is the wingnut equivalent of rearranging the deck chairs, etc.