From Ann Coulter's "faggot" line at CPAC to journalists whining about liberal nastiness, we have ample evidence that there is some kind of dissonance in the way one approaches the growing issue of the place of blogs - and the way speech happens on the net - and the way the issue is covered by the media. In the Think Progress.org post linked above, we have journalists complain that, when their pieces are highlighted on blogs, they get nasty e-mails. I can imagine they do; I can even imagine some of those e-mails cross the line from adolescent vulgarity to somewhat scary, if for no other reason than there are scary people out there, and politics is irrelevant to that whole question. In a week where we have had Howard Kurtz type love notes to Michelle Malkin - who, in outing college students, managed to get their lives threatened - and whine about how nasty some comments at Huffington Post were. This whole issue is starting to come to a head, and I think we need to ask some questions here, before we get all caught up and perspective is lost.
First, how many people have died because of nasty e-mails from liberal bloggers? I do not ask this question lightly, nor do I think it a frivolous one. Again, how many people have been hurt or killed, directly or indirectly as a result of liberal vulgarity? Joe Klein can whine about straw leftists and their hateful ways, but how many Americans have lefties killed lately?
I will return to this question, but first I would offer a reflection from Talking Points Memo.com, specifically this post in which a reader challenges any leader of the Democratic party to hang not only Coulter and her remarks, but Limbaugh, Hannity - the whole gasbag gallery - firmly around the neck of the entire Republican establishment. Glenn Greenwald has already done so, but he is not Howard Dean, or Hillary Clinton, or Barack Obama, or Harry Reid, or any other establishment Democrat. If this part of the freak-show aspect of American political culture is going to have a home, it needs to be firmly planted where it belongs - Republican territory. That, indeed, is step one of taking back our public dialogue from these filth-peddlers. Digby makes much the same point here and needs to be read in full because much of what he - and the others linked here - are background for the point I am trying to make here.
These links are important precisely because I wish to take the charge against Republicans and their filth-spewing publicists a step further, returning now to the question of the results of such speech, both from the left and the right. First, it is important to note, as Digby does in the piece linked above, that an anonymous commenter on some website is not the same in terms of public impact as Rush Limbaugh insisting Hillary Clinton is a conspiratorial murderer or Sean Hannity smearing an entire church congregation because of the political views of one of its members. Limbaugh, Coulter, Hannity, - these folks entire life-style is monetarily derived from speaking horrifically. Limbaugh could not have become an oxycontin addict, or afforded a trip to the Dominican Republic (famous for its underage sex trade) if not for his radio show; Coulter could not afford a whole retinue of body guards, houses all over the place, and her seemingly endless supply of cigarettes were it not for her ridiculously non-researched "books". People think of these folks, and others, as thoughtful, brilliant, the source of all wisdom (all those "dittoheads"), and as a result our public discourse has become seriously deranged.
More to the point, however, is the hate speech coming from those in public office. Dick Cheney said that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted his WMD program; Condoleeza Rice said that questions were inappropriate because the answer might be a mushroom cloud over some American city; Rumsfeld, Feith, even Pres. Bush poo-pooed questions of the cost and duration of the war and its aftermath - Feith going so far as insisting that we could, in essence, steal oil money from the Iraqis to pay for the war (like the Soviet Union did to Germany at the end of WWII). Cheney continues to insist that there were operational links between al-Qaeda and the former Iraqi regime, despite them being repeatedly debunked (and not one single journalist has called him on this particular fantasy). Alberto Gonzalez, before him John Ashcroft, John Yu, and others at the Justice Department, insist that due process is a luxury we can ill-afford at a time when we are fighting for western civilization against the barbarian hordes, locking anonymous people away for years at a time, without charge, without any way of finding out who these people are or why they are being held; indeed, Gonzalez claimed in a Senate hearing that the constitution of the United States does not guarantee the right of habeas corpus - something I do believe the authors of that document might have been surprised to learn.
All this is hate speech because it, like the vomitous spew from unelected spokespersons like Coulter, is opposed to so much of what is traditionally American (although, to b honest, hating others, not least sexual and racial and religious minorities is, sadly, as American as cherry pie), and is much more insidious because, like the more blatant rhetoric of a Limbaugh or Michael Savage, one would think it needs to be taken seriously precisely because of its source - official, elected leaders of our government. It is hate speech because it leads to the silencing of dissent, the destruction of our constitutional rights and liberties, and an entire climate in which opposition views can be considered marginal at best precisely because they are defined by official sources as obstructing national survival. We currently are invovled in two "regional" wars, or perhaps two fronts in the same region, and tens of thousands on all sides are dead - as a direct result of the hate speech spewed forth from official sources and their cheerleaders.
Some anonymous commenter on some liberal website may be egregiously awful; the V-P of the United States insisting that the President of the United States can take the country to war regardless of the will of Congress is truly dangerous hate speech, for so many reasons one should not have to list them. This is the fundamental difference. Coulter's little missive about Edwards' sexuality is insignificant in and of itself; it is part and parcel, however, of a much larger pattern of destructive, hateful speech that has led to the deaths of thousands, the shredding of the Constitution, and the whithering of serious political dialogue in this country. This is a perspective one would hope journalists, who now wring their hands and wipe their brows at liberal bloggers sending them nasty notes, would understand and consider.
Virtual Tin Cup
