Civility!
"Civility" is often described as a a Lofty Ideal, but that is all my balls.
"Civility" is the goal of political speech.
Politics is a fight over who gets the right to decide what most people are allowed to say when they are being "civil." Period.
For instance, as we were saying, this garbage:
Thus everybody realizes government spending has lost its airbrakes.
That is the attempt of an ideologue to define what "everybody" believes, even though it's an entirely ideological statement.
That's politics! And "civility."
The people who are speaking Good Sense agree! Let us enforce who speaks Good Sense, then, even if it's crap.
Hence, what Steve M said here.
If the story the righties are telling is true, there's a guy on the loose who should be locked up. But their blogswarm today doesn't seem to be focused on getting him locked up -- it seems to be focused (as is practically everything right-wingers say and do) on damaging liberalism.On the right, that's Priority #1 -- and #2 and #3 and #4 and #5. The posts and tweets I've looked at are full of references to George Soros and the Tides Foundation and Barbra Streisand (because, you see, giving money to organizations that include a guy you don't know is a criminal is a disgusting, shameful, immoral act, which makes you an accessory to crimes you didn't know had taken place, and haven't been conclusively shown to be the grant recipient's doing).
Observe the response of the Glenn Beck Blaze to this weird story about a lone crank and con-artist.
Headline:
MEET SOROS-FUNDED DOMESTIC TERRORIST BRETT KIMBERLIN WHOSE ‘JOB’ IS TERRORIZING BLOGGERS INTO SILENCE
Say hi!
But then, in their own story, we learn that Kimberlin is a sociopathic con artist whose primary motivation isn't political!
So if Soros funded him, Soros got duped and is the victim of fraud.
Nice headline.
But then, that's politics for you. And also "civility," namely, a grubby squabble in the muddy playpen for victim status.
We could have a political system based more on a more productive concept of "civility" than we currently do, but that would require an elite journalistic class that requires knowing things and is not Mark Halperin, so we're fucked.