‘Civility’, they say

This morning, Sunday in America, the weekend talk shows are in full swing, and if you had a dollar for every time “we need a return to civility” is being uttered you would be rich indeed.

Ah, civility, which the mainstream media’s flying monkeys would have you believe is running deficits on both sides of the political divide. Civility like the New Republic cover pictured above. Once, years ago, the weekly magazine was a sane, reliable source of centre left nostrums and perspectives. No longer. It changed hands several years ago and, well, that cover equating Trump with one of history’s greatest mass murderers has been standard fare ever since.

You want more civility? Try veteran congresswoman Maxine Waters, who marked Trump’s 2016 victory by urging Democrats to get in Republican’s faces, abuse them in restaurants and department stores. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s first flak, was driven from a Virginia eatery within days.

It has been a relentless, multi-faceted assault ever since, as evidenced by Nancy Pelosi’s denunciation just two weeks ago of Trump and the MAGA movement: “This is something that is undermining our democracy. He must be stopped. He cannot be president!”

“This is something that is undermining our democracy. He must be stopped. He cannot be president!”

One might also cite Veep Kamala Harris rattling the cup for the Black Lives Matter rioters  during 2020’s summer of smoke over American cities and mayhem in their streets. Those scenes of anarchy, memorably described by a CNN hack in front of buildings in flames, were “fiery but mostly peaceful.”

This how the state media always plays it. Consider the January 6 hearings and its nakedly partisan panel of hard-left Democrats and a pair of Never Trump Republican quislings. No such thing had ever happened before, TV’s talking heads repeatedly intoned, counting on the public’s general ignorance and short memories to avoid mention of the Puerto Rican separtists who opened fire on the House of Representatives from the public gallery in 1954.

Okay, that’s ancient history, but the same anchors and pundits also found it convenient to ignore the feminist occupation of the Capitol during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings just a few years earlier.

Civility, yes it would indeed be nice to see its return. As nice as it is unlikely.

UPDATE: On CNN just now, Obama strategist and stage-manager David Axelrod, the Clinton era veteran and one of the insiders who prepped Biden for his disastrous debate,  is slamming J.D. Vance, the Ohio senator said to be a leading GOP veep candidate, for adding fuel to the dumpster fire of US election year politics.

Vance’s crime was noting that gross distortions, such as that New Republic cover, encouraged violence and, yesterday, an idiot 20-year-old to squeezing the trigger.

Noting that cause and effect, Axelrod has just said, shows why Vance is not fit to be within a heartbeat of the presidency.

Vance lacks “civility” don’t you know.

UPDATE II:  Democrats talking up violence as the solution to their Trump problem.

— roger franklin