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Enough Already With The Phony, Hypocritical, Nauseating Calls For Civility
GrassTopsUSA Exclusive Commentary
By Don Feder
01/24/2011

         Last week, the left was saying that conservatives from Sarah Palin to Rush Limbaugh and the Tea Parties had blood on their hands – that the right created the climate of hate that somehow caused/provoked/impelled/influenced a g-string-wearing, “Communist Manifesto”-touting psychopath (whose brains are “scrambled,” according to one of his professors) to shoot a Congresswoman in the head and murder a federal judge and five others.

         This week, the Botticellis of bile are calling for civility and unity, asking everyone in politics (but especially conservatives, who, naturally, have the most to atone for) to dial down their rhetoric whilst a celestial choir hums Kumbaya in the background.

         At a memorial service-cum-political rally (they even handed out T-shirts with the slogan “Together We Thrive”), President Butter-Wouldn’t-Melt-In-His-Mouth set the tone. “The truth is, none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack,” the president soberly declared – after his minions had spent the preceding week telling us they knew exactly what triggered the attack: conservative talk radio, raucous town hall meetings, Arizona’s attempt to crack down on illegal immigration and Where’s-Waldo, played with Obama’s birth certificate.

         “What we can not do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on each other. That we cannot do,” proclaimed the president who’s spent the past two years savaging his opponents, telling Hispanics to “punish” their “enemies,” urging his supporters to bring guns to knife-fights, and sneering that Republicans "can come for the ride, but they gotta sit back" – presumably blindfolded and gagged.

         In a classic example of the liberal disconnect from reality, in some cases the calls for civility and the smears went on simultaneously.

         While it pleaded for decency in the political dialogue, the Soros-funded Center for American Progress charged that by “taking a knife” to state spending, Arizona Governor Jan Brewster had passed a “death sentence” on Medicaid recipients, and that this was one of the “tragedies” leading up to the shootings. Today budget cuts; tomorrow mass murder.

         The New York Times (which lives on Planet Upper West Side) seconded Mr. Obama’s calls for civility, and indicted those “whose partisanship has been excessive and whose words have sown the most division and dread.” The Times sternly called on these malefactors of commentary and oratory to “stop demonizing their political opponents.”

         In case you’re curious, here’s what the Times is not thinking of when it condemns words which have sown division and dread, and individuals guilty of demonizing their opponents:
 
• Former Congressman Paul Kanjorski (D-Pa.), chosen by the Gray Lady to pen a sermonette calling for an end to “violent (verbal) confrontation” and a negative “political climate.” During the past campaign, Kanjorski said of Florida Governor Rick Scott, “They ought to put him against a wall and shoot him.”

• The Reverend Al Sharpton, who wrote a similar plea in The Washington Post. Throughout the 1990s, Sharpton stoked the fires of racial and religious hatred, often with lethal results. Critics have accused him of sparking a pogrom which led to the death of a rabbinic student in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. While delivering a eulogy for a black child killed in an auto accident, Rev. Slime Creature referred to Hassidic Jews as “diamond merchants” – rich, greedy Jews who care only for themselves.

• Former television host Montel Williams, who, in 2009, urged Rep. Michelle Bachmann to commit suicide. (Williams: “Michelle, slit your wrist. Go ahead…or, do us a better thing. Move that knife up about two feet. Start at the collarbone.”)

• San Francisco talk-show host Mike Malloy, who shared his fantasy of “Rush Limbaugh choking on his throat fat … so he suffocates.”

• Representatives of a New Jersey Teachers Union who half-jokingly prayed that the Lord would gather unto His bosom Republican Governor Chris Christie.

• “The View’s” Joy Behar saying Nevada GOP Senate candidate Sharron Angle was “going to hell, this bitch!” for making commercials slamming Majority Leader Harry Reid’s stand on illegal immigration. I’d like to see her try that in Gotham, Behar fumed. “Come here, bitch, come to New York and do it.”

•In the 2008 campaign, loudmouth leftie comedienne Sarah Bernhard warning that if Sarah Palin came to New York City, she would be “gang-raped by my big black brothers.”

• In 2004, Democrat Daddy Warbucks George Soros saying W. reminded him of (who else?) the Nazis. “When I hear Bush say, ‘You’re either with us or against us,’ it reminds me of the Germans,” Soros disclosed. Hint: The Germans he had in mind weren’t Beethoven and Brahms.

• For the left, comparing their opponents to National Socialists is like eating potato chips. When the House was debating repeal of Obama Care, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN.) charged that calling it a government takeover of health care was “a big lie like Goebbels (sic).” In case someone, somewhere in the North American continent, missed the point, Cohen added, “The Germans said enough about the Jews and people believed it – believed it and you have the Holocaust.” If Republicans keep talking about rationing, the next thing you know, Obama’s 2,000-plus page health care law will be hauled off to a concentration camp, in an 18-wheeler.

         In the wacky world of The New York Times, none of the foregoing constitutes demonizing political opponents or words that have “sown the most division and dread.”

         Instead, the Times informed us, “It is legitimate to hold Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible for the gale of anger” which has set “the nation on edge” by “demonizing (illegal) immigrants, or welfare recipients, or bureaucrats.” Given the way the partisan journal masquerading as a newspaper feels about these groups, it’s surprising it didn’t characterize such criticism as sacrilege.

         Cut through the smug posturing and womanish hysteria, and this is what the left means by civility (to paraphrase the lyrics of “Blue Suede Shoes”): We can knock you down, step in your face, slander your name all over the place – we can urge you to slit your wrists, compare you to the Nazis, call you a bitch going to hell, say you should be lined up against a wall and shot, fantasize about gang rape, and its all part of the legitimate political debate.

         Or, in the words of a January 2 New York Times story fawning over former Rep. Alan Grayson, an attempt to “put complex issues into accessible – and, yes, memorable – terms.”

         Times’ reporter Michael Barbaro got moist over the wonderfulness of the one-term Florida congressman, who, in the midst of last year’s health-care debate, casually remarked that Republicans’ prescription for the sick was to “die quickly.”

         Grayson described the man he lost to in a landslide in November as a “bizarre fundamentalist,” said the GOP was “a hopelessly sellout party that will never do anything constructive for ordinary people in this country,” claimed he had “trouble listening to what (Dick Cheney) says sometimes because of the blood that drips from his teeth while he’s talking” and indicted Tea Party activists as "bought and paid for by the enormously rich and selfish.”

         Grayson may have done the seemingly impossible – proven you really can be too stupid to serve in Congress.

         Instead of calling him to task for behaving like the political equivalent of an infant throwing feces, the puff-piece celebrated Grayson as “pugnaciously partisan” and the “liberal folk hero of the 111th Congress,” while chuckling over his bad-boy “verbal-bomb-tossing” – the scamp!

         Conservatives are crucified for indicting big government. When liberals wallow in the mud, they’re toasted as “pugnaciously partisan.”

         And now, hold on to your hankies, my personal favorite for the Meaningless Symbolism Award for 2011. Republican Senator Tom Coburn and Democrat Chuck Schumer have announced they’ll sit together during the State of the Union Address tomorrow evening – after which Schumer will call Coburn a “bitch going to hell,” and sweetness and light will reign forevermore.

         Like Coburn, conservatives regularly fall into the left’s civility trap, by taking this rot seriously. Instead of saying, “Oh, shut up, you bloody, hypocrites,” we treat their humbuggery as a genuine call for decency and moderation.

         Let us admit it is wrong to call for the death, destruction, damnation, decapitation, disembowelment, dismemberment, or gang-rape of one’s political opponents.

         That having been said, how can we engage in what’s euphemistically called a spirited debate (express our contempt for the left’s plans to destroy America) while bound by the political equivalent of Emily Post’s “Etiquette” – rules which apply to only one side?

         Left and right don’t just disagree on how to address problems. The left either manufactures problems, pretends they don’t exist or (a la Rahm Emanuel) views them as opportunities to expand the power and scope of government, commandeer more of our income, put more crushing controls on enterprise and further restrict personal freedom.

         How do we dialogue with those who believe the unborn child (with a heartbeat, brainwaves and human DNA) is a lump of tissue? How do we politely demur to those who think suicide bombers are oppressed? How can we have a spirited debate with ideologues who think race trumps justice? How do we dissent from those who blithely assume that a government that can’t deliver the mail on time can run our nation’s health care system? How can we reason with individuals who insist on calling terrorists “militants”? How can we contend with those who think tax cuts are a form of income redistribution?

         The real danger of the civility trap is that the left believes everything goes better with the mailed-fist of government.

         Rep. Bob Brady (D-Pa.) says he’ll file legislation to criminalize speech or images that sound like they’re threatening Congressmen or public officials. In an unguarded moment, you probably could get Brady to admit that he believes criticizing Congressmen should be a crime.

         Is it paranoid to imagine the Obama FCC threatening stations for broadcasts deemed uncivil, or the Obama FEC fining candidates for negative campaigning (the flip side of words that wound) – all selectively enforced?

         Obama may soon be looking for a Civility Czar. Alan Grayson might want to keep his options open.

Don Feder is a former Boston Herald writer who is now a political/communications consultant. He also maintains his own website, DonFeder.com.