This is a thread designed for looking at the Democrat claims, that extreme rhetoric contributed to the Tucson shooting (dubious), and to a less civil public debate in general (pretty plausible, actually). Obama talked today about national soul searching, and I always go along with him when he's got a good idea, so let's do it. We'll probably be talking about ourselves as much as the public figures we discuss, so just a heads up.about doing that.

Here's the way it works. Post an example of public rhetoric that you find over-the-top. It doesn't have to encourage violence or anything like that. It doesn't have to be hateful necessarily, it doesn't even have to be deliberate. It just has to be, in your mind, dehumanizing, or in some way destructive to productive public debate. You make the call about what qualifies.

You can't just nominate a person ("Oh, so-and-so is awful"), you have to nominate a specific behavior or thing they said.

When you nominate something, you're making the implied statement "I would be equally condemning of this if someone in the other party said the same thing." This is going to be tricky with people known to condemn one party or the other pretty much exclusively, and it's the main reason why we'll be looking at ourselves as much as the public figures we discuss. Some people tend to condemn one party and give a free pass to the other, but even the moderates who slam or praise both sides tend to at least lean towards one or the other, and have unconscious biases.

When somebody posts something, everyone else can chime in, and either agree that it's over-the-top, or argue that no, it's basically harmless (hopefully explaining why). No intellectual consistency will be assumed. If you post an example of something objectionable, and somebody else posts a virtually identical quote from the other side, we won't assume that the original poster is equally condemning of that one unless they actually come out and say so. (Cause that's how a lot of people justifity to themselves "Oh, I condemn both sides, the only difference is one I condemn publicly and the other mentally. In my mind, I'm fair.") Everybody is unfair to some extent, but the question is how unfair are you?

To kick it off, I'd like to nominate two similar offenders. One is the one that Kevin posted the other day in Politics2. The campaign ad that went:



The other is the Joe Manchin campaign ad in which he takes a rifle and fires bullets through ObamaCare, Cap and Trade, et cetera.

My problem with both of them is about the same. The Democrats have advanced the charge that the metaphors alone are destructive when the other side does it, but okay for them somehow. That's hypocritical, of course. I don't have a problem with gun metaphors ("Targeting", "Lock and Load", the very word "campaign" is a military term), but somehow mixing shooting metaphors in with literal shooting strikes me as in bad taste.


Of the two, Manchin's seems less objectionable, since his literal shooting is at bills and abstract concepts.




EDIT: Oh, one other thing about the "rules" of the thread. You don't have to "nominate" something to post it. You can just throw it out there and solicit opinion about it. ("I'm not sure if this is over-the-top or not, what does everyone else think?")

Petrosianic, that link about shooting an M16 was posted by Ken, not me. You got me all confused wondering when I posted that

I've recently seen some daft political comment, but in the 'what are they on about?' category rather than the 'that's dangerously inflammatory' one. I've had a quick look and can't find any pithy summaries to stick up here but I'll post again if I do.

My bad. Too many people whose names start with Ke.

Here's another double nomination.

1) Ann If Liberals Had Any Brains They'd Be Republicans Coulter, and

2) Al Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot Franken.

I know I said you can't nominate people, only actions and statements, so I'm nominating the titles of those two books as being particularly indicative of what Coulter and Franken are all about.

Those last two are an interesting set.

In one way, Coulters is worse, because she goes after a whole group of people, while Frankens only goes after one.

But in another way, Franken's is worse, because Coulters at least is at least vaguely policy based ("liberals must be stupid to support the policies they do"), while Franken's is more visceral ("I dislike the other side on a very deep and personal level").

I wouldn't be seen carrying either book, they don't match the image I want to project. But oddly enough, I might be seen carrying BOTH of them at the same time, because it would confuse the heck out of people.

Ann Coulter is a brilliant satirist.

Coulter is much worse. Franken can be funny, but Coulter is a humorless prig. She wrote about about liberals with a title like "Traitors" or "Treason" or some such.

Tongue in cheek question: Are you saying Coulter should be funnier?

Serious question: But do you agree that both are over the line? As I say, I wouldn't be seen carrying either book.

I would say that Franken isn't over the line, as he is obviously making a joke. He's using ridicule which is overdo. Coulter does it all seriously, so all her stuff is excessive. Her vitriol is counter-productive; a lot of people won't consider her arguments at all since they are really just meta-insults.

Well, trying to, anyway. "So-and-so is a big fat idiot" isn't really a joke, although it might be a failed attempt. "Baldric, your head is emptier than a hermit's address book" is a joke. But funny or not, it seems that Franken's title discourages discussion rather than encourages it.

But that's what the thread is about, to see what people do and don't consider over the top. I don't really care about which title is "worse", so much as in whether either one deserves a passsing grade. If one gets an F and the other gets an F+, then it doesn't matter than one was better than the other. I'd give them both an F-something. (and if that isn't the straight line of the century, I don't know what is).