In her column today, Parker discusses how “recent events and trends” in politics such as the tea partiers dominating town hall meetings, “sideshow rants on television” and Rep. Joe Wilson’s “You lie” to Obama “have brought vague unease about manners into sharper focus.”
She then discusses such historical notes as the 1828 and 1832 elections (neither one a model of decorum) but concludes that there has been a huge change in civility levels which she blames on “the new media—the Internet, the blogosphere, and all the social applications from Facebook to Twitter.”
As media watchdog Bob Somerbsy points out, this makes it sound like Parker was asleep since Bush one left office. How else did she miss the incivility of the Clintons being accused of drug dealing, murder, killing Vince Foster, or the press penchant to make up stuff Al Gore never said?
And all of those were the work of the mainstream media—cable news, the papers, talk radio—not bloggers.
For that matter, her recent examples all take place since Obama’s election. There’s no reference to the countless screams about how Democrats were traitors who wanted terrorists to win and were hoping for an attack on America for political gain (the latter is another charge made by Limbaugh). Or Cheney’s “Go f___ yourself” to a member of the Senate.
Or Ann Coulter’s declaration that she’d have no problem with Timothy McVeigh if he’d blown up the New York Times instead of the Murrah Building, or that someone should murder Supreme Court Justice Stevens.
Or Parker’s own article quoting with approval a man who said the 2004 Democratic presidential candidates should be lined up and shot.
I think we have much worse problems than incivility, but if impoliteness is going to be an issue, we should at least get the history right.
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Archive for the 'Pundits' Category
Kathleen Parker’s finger points in the wrong direction
November 18th, 2009, 11:51 am by fshermanHey, someone’s got to lose.
November 16th, 2009, 3:51 pm by fshermanPundit Peter Beinart explains why the Democrats did right to eliminate abortion from insurance coverage under the health-care plan: To have political clout they need to return to the days when the sexists and racists were part of the party: “This was the devil’s pact that defined the Democratic Party for more than three decades, until the civil rights and women’s movement forced party leaders to choose. They reluctantly chose racial and gender equality, and so the racists and the misogynists drifted away. The Democratic Party became culturally liberal: pro-affirmative action, pro-choice, and smaller, since the old racists and sexists, now repackaged as racial and sexual conservatives, flocked to the GOP. Starting in 1968, Democrats began consistently losing the presidency. And in 1994, the realignment finally trickled down to the House of Representatives, and the Democrats lost that, too.”
In other words, going back to the days when Democrats opposed women’s rights and civil rights would be a good thing for America!
As several bloggers have pointed out, it’s telling that pundits frame the debate over the Stupak anti-abortion amendment as a matter of “well, the pro-choice forces had to compromise to get this passed.” Never a suggestion that the right-to-lifers who voted for the bill should have compromised.
Ron Hart, wrong again
November 16th, 2009, 3:17 pm by fshermanI can’t really blame him, I guess: The media have been full of discussions of how the elections this month are a massive blow to the admministration, so it’s not surprising he parroted the same idea—”the most important votes took place in the purple-to-blluish states of New Jersey and Virginia, where the citizenry rejected Obama and elected Republican governors … Nancy Pelosi articulated a whopper by saying this was a big win for the Democrats and Obama.”
Nancy Pelosi is, of course, House speaker; with two special elections to fill two House seats, the Democrats won both, gaining a congressional seat. So from her perspective, it is a big win—why would she fret about the governorship?
And of course, the Republican lost in a traditionally Republican district, because of infighting that squeezed out a moderate in favor of a far rightist. That certainly doesn’t bode well for the Republicans’ prospects.
As for the Virginia governorship, I’ve read that the Democratic candidate specifically distanced himself from Obama’s policies, particularly on health reform. And Virginia’s Republican votes were only marginally higher than when Obama beat McCain last year.
Like I said, standard pundit wisdom is that this was great news for Republicans (as many bloggers have pointed out, the supposedly “liberal” media seem to find everything is good news for Republicans), so I guess I can’t blame Hart for being as wrong as he always is.
For some people, I guess it was all about oil
November 12th, 2009, 2:52 pm by fshermanA New York Times article details how Peter Galbraith—Iraq-war supporter who negotiated a Constitutional deal giving the Kurds control of new oil finds in their territory and championed that right in multiple opinion pieces—stands to make millions due to his relationship with an oil company investing in Kurdistan.
Galbraith’s own statement: “I may have had interests, but there were no conflicts.”
Two points about Mary Ready’s Saturday column
November 2nd, 2009, 2:52 pm by fshermanThere are no recorded cases of anyone putting poison or razor blades into Halloween goodies and handing them out to children at large (I believe there’s been one or two where they were given to specific children).
2)Neither bonfires nor Wicca are Satanic. Unless you assume everything non-Christian is Satanic, but even then pagans and witches are no worse than say, Festivus or Ramadan.
Ron Hart, wrong on multiple points
October 30th, 2009, 2:26 pm by fshermanFrom his column (I think it’s only in the Sun this time):
“the voters will not get those facts if Obama has his way and undermines the free press—a.k.a. Fox News and talk radio. His administration has declared war on Fox News, the only organization left on TV which will take Obama to task and report the truth. ”
How exactly is saying Fox News is biased and not giving them interviews a war on the free press? The Bush administration and its dutiful pundits screamed about how everyone was biased all through W’s White House tenure (and still do); they’ve also cut journalists out of the loop for not taking the appropriate position.
Yes, I know, Fox is a Republican organ and as a loyal Republican, Hart is obligated to take its side. But it’s still nonsense.
“Not until his henchmen, or -women, who do his daily dirty work while he smiles and strokes people just like they wrote it for him on his teleprompter, come after you do you realize how dangerous they are. ”
Like say, the military accidentally shooting journalists in Iraq? Or holding them without trial or charges? Funny, don’t remember a peep out of Hart about that.
Hart: “Emanuel revealed himself early by saying that Democrats “should never let a good crisis go to waste.” Translation: take any advantage you can to push your spending bills and agenda, and never mind that they are not related to the “crisis.” And if there is one thing that politicians produce well, it is a crisis. ”
As opposed to say, Bush, who said in 1999 that if he got into a war, he was going to milk it for political capital to push his domestic agenda?
“Obama’s administration even told federal law enforcement not to go after California’s marijuana sales. I guess his new motto is “Yes we cannabis.” It will be easier to pass their agenda if the country is stoned. ”
And Hart thinks this is a bad thing? We will have to disagree on that.
“In another assault on free enterprise, Obama overreached and cut salaries of some executives 90 percent (no word on cutting his own administration’s salaries based on performance). This came after passing a bill that purchased more personal jet aircraft for the government. To be sure, our elected officials should fly in style since they are now auto executives and bank presidents. ”
Let’s be clear: He cut the salaries of executives in companies taking bail-out money. They had the option to refuse the government money and be true to their free-market principles; when they didn’t, they accepted the government yoke.
Come on, if the automakers had announced they were using their bail out funds to give huge bonuses to all the union workers, Hart would have a complete meltdown; so what’s the difference? Especially given that many of these executives are the same ones who led their company into the gutter of red ink.
As usual, Mr. Hart is a world of FAIL.
Walter Williams, humor writer
October 30th, 2009, 2:15 pm by fshermanOn Obama’s military policies: “If we become a military weakling, who is going to protect Europe?”
Given that we have a military budget equal to the rest of the entire world’s, has Williams any evidence Obama plans to cut it enough to make us a “weakling?”
Hammers and nails
October 23rd, 2009, 11:28 am by fshermanThere’s an old saying that the person who’s an expert with a hammer sees every problem as a nail. Apparently it applies to pundits too.
Specifically, Walter Williams, whose columns focus repeatedly on how government, in his opinion, is screwing up the world. Which is, of course, a valid topic, except that he tends to use it on topics that have only marginal relevance.
When Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Building, for instance, Williams devoted one paragraph to what a bad thing that was, then devoted the rest of his column to all the terrible things government does that drive decent people to terrorism (contrasting this to his post-9/11 screeching about Muslim terrorism is illuminating—apparently being hard on terrorism is a good thing unless the terrorist is a white right-winger).
In his latest column he discusses how Americ has gone from “an 18th century Third World nation into the freest and most prosperous nation in mankind’s entire history … what accounts for what some have called American exceptionalism?”
More specifically, how have we avoided “the level of hideousness seen in other nations … despite the fact that our population consists of people who have for centuries been trying to slaughter one another in their home countries, whether the struggle was between the French and Germans, or the English and Irish, or the Japanese and Chinese, or the Palestinians and Jews” plus of course, longstanding religious conflicts. “Why is the United States an exception?”
His conclusion: It’s because Americans drafted a Constitution that set strict limits on government, and that by unconstitutional acts such as the bailout, “we are losing what has made our country great.”
And the connection with why we’ve not wound up killing ourselves is—what? Does he really imagine that hostility between the Palestinians and the Jews is caused by big government.
Also, while I agree with him it’s amazing we haven’t wound in endless Civil War, the amazement isn’t over all the wars immigrants had back home, it’s because of all the horrors we’ve had here: The slaughter of the native tribes, keeping blacks in slavery for centuries, Jim Crow … That has nothing to do with the wars between Japan and Ireland and Germany and France, it’s something ingrown in us.
But Williams never fusses about discrimination unless it affects straight white males, so it’s not surprising he’d rather not discuss that stuff.
Double standards
October 22nd, 2009, 2:23 pm by fshermanIt’s probably not news to anyone that Rush Limbaugh has been in high dudgeon—deservedly—over being slammed as a racist with some false quotes (though there are certainly valid ones from over the years).
However, as Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting points out, he’s no qualms in falsely quoting others: “On April 27, 1995, Limbaugh read examples of “liberal hate speech” by Pacifica radio host Julianne Malveaux and CBS reporter Eric Engberg from the right-wing Media Research Center’s newsletter, unaware that he was reading fake quotes from the April Fool’s edition published almost a month earlier. The next day (4/28/95), Limbaugh admitted the quotes were false, but he heroically refused to apologize to the journalists he had falsely smeared: “Given some of the things liberals actually do say, it’s not too tough to believe they would say the things Bozell makes up.”"
Slightly overheated
October 19th, 2009, 12:25 pm by fshermanBlogger/pundit Roy Edroso’s Village Voice column this week discusses the outrage on the right that the NFL has decided not to let Rush Limbaugh become part owner of a team. My favorite quote about the NFL, from the Clark County Politics blog: “Watching it now is the same thing as watching a play put on by the Klan. It’s as distasteful and angering as watching an American Nazi party rally.”
Even if I considered this a monumental miscarriage of justice, that would be laughable. As documented by multiple sources, Limbaugh has a long history of making racist (or race-baiting) remarks, even though some of the ones quoted during the controversy were false (and that’s a bad thing–nobody should be hung based on something they never said). If the owners decide he’s too hot to handle in a game where so many black men play–well, whether or not that’s a good decision, it hardly compares to burning a cross on his lawn.
