L Gordon Crovitz wrote an article in the WSJ headlined: “Is Internet Civility an Oxymoron? Unmoderated, anonymous comments on Web sites create more noise than wisdom.”
My response:
A few days ago Bill Clinton waged a neo-McCarthyite smear campaign against dissidents and protesters, trying to link their activity to the Oklahoma City bombing. I don’t think you can blame the Internet or anonymity for that kind of uncivil rhetoric.
Bill Clinton says words matter. From an AP article:
“By all means keep fighting, by all means, keep arguing,” he said. “But remember, words have consequences as much as actions do, and what we advocate, commensurate with our position and responsibility, we have to take responsibility for. We owe that to Oklahoma City.”
This, of course, is the president who exuded the aura of a B-movie gangster every time he spoke, and never more so than when he said this in 1995:
“The most important thing we can do to make your father [a member of the national police force] safer is to have everybody in this room, whatever their political party or their views, stand up and say it is wrong to condemn people who are out there doing their job and wrong to threaten them. When you hear somebody doing it, you ought to stand up and double up your fist and stick it in the sky and shout them down.”
Of course, if Clinton had read the Bill of Rights, he would have learned that it is NOT wrong to criticize federal employees who are doing their jobs. And if he was a man who was careful with his words, he would not have said that the response to people who threaten actual harm (as opposed to criticism) of national police officers is not to have a mob outshout them.
And if he was really, really careful of what he was saying, he would not try to do something so sleazy as to link dissent with the Oklahoma City bombing.
The AP article mentioned none of this, btw. I’m guessing it put out the article without bothering to get the response of other politicians to Clinton’s words.
My comment to the Battle Creek Enquirer article, “Obama hails job news“
So one day President Obama is telling critics that it has only been a week, that we need to give his health care takeover time to work. Then one jobs report comes out with some good news. It’s far too early to tell if a trend has been established, but the President jumps up and says it shows the economy is turning around.
So how are we supposed to know when patience is a good thing and when it’s better to jump to conclusions?
From a NYT headline: “…Forced to Reconcile Policy and Words”
No, the NYT is not re-examining or reversing its ideology. Those words do not refer to President Obama.
Peter Grier, math wizard and Christian Science Monitor reporter, says the following in an article headlined, “John Patrick Bedell: Did right-wing extremism lead to shooting?“
John Patrick Bedell, whom authorities identified as the gunman in the Pentagon shooting on Thursday, appears to have been a right-wing extremist with virulent antigovernment feelings.
If so, that would make the Pentagon shooting the second violent extremist attack on a federal building within the past month. On Feb. 18, Joseph Stack flew a small aircraft into an IRS building in Austin, Texas. Mr. Stack left behind a disjointed screed in which, among other things, he expressed his hatred of the government. (For more on this incident, click here.)
If so??
So what about if Bedell was not a right-wing extremist? What if he was a left-wing extremist? Would that change the count? Would that mean this would have been the 3rd violent extremist attack attack on a federal building this month? Or the first? What are the rules of addition and subtraction that we’re supposed to use here?
And what about that phrase, “among other things”? If you accept Grier’s invitation and click on the link, you find out that one of the “other things” Stack hated was corporations. If you go looking for his exact words, you find that he used language even more virulent than President Obama’s. Does this mean that President Obama is almost a rightwing extremist, too? Does Janet Napalitano know about this?
The next time anyone suggests that we take seriously something that President Obama said, we should point to the media attack on Jim Bunning. The next time anyone suggests that we need higher taxes to pay for important social programs, or to bring down the deficit, or anything else, we should point to the media attack on Jim Bunning. The scandalous behavior of the media and everyone else who participated in the orchestrated smear campaign on the Senator from Kentucky shows the pointlessness of any of this.
I say orchestrated, because there is no way that anyone who pays any attention to the news or did his own thinking would have repeated the attacks on Bunning without referring to the Pay-Go legislation that President Obama and Congress had enacted just a few weeks ago. Only mindless functionaries could have failed to bring that into the discussion.
Or, maybe it’s the case that Pay-Go did come to mind, but nobody took Congress or the President seriously when that legislation was enacted. If that’s the case, there is no reason to take them seriously whey they say or do anything else.
If the news media had done its job of reporting instead of smearing, we could have had a valuable discussion. Instead of repeating the claim that one person was holding up the legislation, we could have come to grips with the points that Bunning raised in an opinion piece that came out in USA Today after the smear had done its work. Here is a quote:
Many people asked me, “Why now?” My answer is, “Why not now?” Why can’t a non-controversial measure in the Senate that would help those in need be paid for? If the Senate cannot find $10 billion to pay for a measure we all support, we will never pay for anything.
Exactly. We will never pay for anything. If the Senate couldn’t find $10 billion anywhere else in the budget to pay for this, there is no need to ever raise taxes again. It would be pointless. The government is just going to print whatever extra money it wants to spend, no matter whether we’re taxed at 10 percent or 90 percent. People may claim that we need to bring down the deficit, but if they took part in the attack on Bunning, we will know their words are worthless. If they didn’t care about the deficit when trying to find money to for a modest extension to unemployment benefits, they will never really care about the deficit, no matter what they claim. It will be a waste of time to believe them.
Which would be a more appropriate headline if such an accusation were made:
Quiz questions:
So what about the following headline:
Toyota Accused of Withholding Records.
What if you read the article under the headline, and find out that it’s just one Congressman who is making these claims?
I posted the following in response to the Battle Creek Enquirer article, “Stations pull ad critical of Schauer.”
“It just goes to show powerful special interests will say and do anything to maintain the status quo that keeps them rich while Michigan families are struggling,” Andrew Piatt, campaign manager for Schauer for Congress, said in an e-mail Friday.
So the Independent Women’s Voice isn’t allowed to use its own money to distribute an inaccurate statement, but the Enquirer will circulate an irresponsibly inaccurate statement by Andrew Piatt free of charge, with no fact-checking. Interesting.
One courageous Senator, Jim Bunning, wants to extend unemployment benefits and COBRA to unemployed workers, and at the same time help President Obama bring the budget deficit under control. But the rest of his colleagues are too stingy and short-sighted to do it. So far I haven’t found a single newspaper that has reported on this conflict.