Quote:
Originally Posted by scottw
democrats like to kick you in the nuts and then demand civility
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Said the pot calling the kettle black
In these times, however, it’s a joke to focus on incivility by Democrats even as the Republican president routinely says things that are as bad as or worse than the attacks of the most irresponsible Democratic no-name precinct chair. Nor is President Donald Trump as much of an outlier as one might imagine. After all, his crusade to declare President Barack Obama a non-citizen was taken up by many Republican politicians; his repeated ethnic slur against Senator Elizabeth Warren, repeated this past weekend, was adapted from one used against her by Massachusetts Republicans.
This strain of Republican rhetoric goes back to Newt Gingrich in the 1980s and 1990s. The lawmaker from Georgia who became House speaker was not just prone to excessive rhetoric himself, but trained Republican politicians to use extreme wording.
Then there’s Republican-aligned media, a constant source of institutionalized incivility that encourages a politics of grievance by searching out any examples of Democratic rhetorical excess.
Basically, anyone who thinks the parties are even remotely equivalent on this score is treating Trump as if he doesn’t count. And anyone who thinks the parties are roughly equivalent if you remove Trump from the equation should take Kevin Drum’s advice and spend more time critically monitoring Republican-aligned media. And, as Norm Ornstein reminds us, critical monitoring is not the same as reacting to the problem of incivility with a “knee-jerk response” of trying to find equal fault on both sides. and using conservative outlets only as a source for finding examples of poor Democratic behavior.
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