Today’s column is a rebuttal to my crowd — the media’s — “this-a-way-that-a-way” machine, which insists on allowing the right to pretend there’s nothing particularly special about their political discourse.
A clip:
As we enter a new Age of Civility, we’re quickly learning that a core component of our national healing involves tossing whole chunks of history down the memory hole.
The right, you see, bears no responsibility for the general nastiness in the air.
Conservatives are sloughing off responsibility for the gun-fueled, hate-laced rhetoric of the last few years faster than Sarah Palin scrubbed that infamous gun-sights map off her Facebook page.
In the interest of national healing, down the hole goes the angry summer of 2009, including violent threats at anti-healthcare town halls engineered by organizations like Rick Scott’s “Conservatives for Patients Rights.”
“So long” to the campaign event at which Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s Republican opponent, Robert Lowry, shot at an effigy of her. Allen West’s pal Joyce Kaufman and Sharron Angle’s “Second Amendment remedies” go “poof,” along with the spittle and epithets hurled at those Democratic congressmen running a tea party gauntlet last year.
We’ll even let pass the town hall held by Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, at which somebody dropped a gun. After all, threatening words were muttered at a tea partier in Tucson.
Let’s set aside the accusations that the Obama administration planned to create “death panels” for seniors — a charge treated seriously by a major cable news channel and that was mouthed by actual congressmen. “Both sides” have such cable news channels, you see. Remember all the times the liberal one ran stories about whether George W. Bush engineered 9/11? No?
Thanks to the new civility, and the media’s awkward but determined voice from nowhere, the fact that “both sides” aren’t showing up armed at political rallies with the president nearby, or holding signs reading: “We came unarmed, this time” or threatening to “water the tree of liberty” — a phrase whose follow-on happens to be, “with the blood of tyrants,” won’t stand in the way of our national healing. You see, George W. Bush was called tyrannical, too.
In fact, it turns out the real victim of the Tucson gun massacre was none other than Sarah Palin, who in defending her “blood libel” charge and target map informed us that unless the voices of herself, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin and Sean Hannity permeate the land, America itself will cease to exist. …
Read the rest here.
No comments:
Post a Comment