A big topic that is very often what journalists call a "sidebar" to so much of our public life the past few years is civility. When the political internet became really prominent about four and a half years ago, as many journalists turned their attention to it, they discovered, horror of horrors, that among many other things, people on the internet were pretty rude to one another. Some even used bad words! Over the course of time, this peripheral phenomenon has mutated, at least in the minds of some of our elite journalists, in to a disdain for any kind of hostile expression in public. Witness the general second-hand embarrassment so many expressed yesterday over Mitch McConnell's Heritage Foundation Speech, following not that hard upon his expressed wish that President Obama be limited to one term. Most, I think, recognize this as a truism, hardly surprising; what bothered them most was the nakedness of it. One just does not make public that the real goal of opposing parties is . . . opposing one another!
I find the issue of civility amusing, in a detached way. It's a game, with the rules set by other people, and I don't play games by rules set by other people. Part of the problem with the criticism of incivility is that it too often offers up false dichotomies. Both sides do it. If we ignore the extremes, that great mass in the middle (and the middle only seems to be defined as that area where this "great mass" exists) can come together and work together to hammer out our differences.
The problem with this view is that it has no basis in fact. Consider a recent description of Pres. Obama's attitude toward bipartisanship. A Republican commentator insisted that Pres. Obama was highly partisan, refused to reach out to Republicans, and only now after Democrats have lost control of the House will he realize what real bipartisanship is all about.
This description is so fanciful it defies description.
Pushing back against it, however, distracts attention from staying on the offensive, or even getting on the defensive. The President loses either by fighting this nonsense or ignoring it. It is the job of people on the outside to speak out as loud and as often as possible that this is, quite simply put, a lie.
Is it uncivil to call a falsehood, well, a lie? Most journalists get itchy when people call an obvious falsehood a lie. They demand that the person making that accusation prove the person who made it understood it to be false before it was made. This is a ridiculous standard. Especially in a case such as the one above. The public record is clear enough; the President worked far too hard to bring Republicans on board everything from Health Care Reform to the Hate Crimes Law, even the failed cap-and-trade climate legislation. He was rebuffed at each and every turn, with the Republicans egged on from the sidelines by commentators and celebrities like Rush Limbaugh and other talkers. Calling a statement like the one above a lie is fairly easy.
Who is uncivil in a case like this? Is it the liar, or the person who calls out the lie? Who is uncivil, a corporation spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for advertising time during the previous election cycle to elect a candidate with no direct ties to that corporation, or those who point out that the game is pretty clearly rigged in favor of deep pocket corporations? Who is uncivil, a member of Congress who favors a tax policy that favors the wealthy at the expense of the working class or the politician who is accused of "class warfare" for pointing this out?
Again, this is a game with rules set by other people. I don't play other people's games, so when I get accused of being uncivil, I tend to ignore it.
Virtual Tin Cup
