on civility and the need for truth

            Since Barack Obama was elected in 2008, Glenn Beck has used his television and radio shows to call the president, variously, a “socialist,” a “fascist,” a “muslim,” and a non-citizen.  Though Beck’s shrieks have been the loudest, they have been echoed by Rush Limbaugh, Michele Malkin, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and nearly every major player in the Tea Party movement.

            Beck et al have also advanced the notion that Obama has a secret agenda to either destroy the American economy or nationalize it (which depends on Beck’s mood du jour apparently), and yet another secret agenda to suborn American sovereignty to some “one-world” government, not to mention the President’s most insidious secret agenda, to take our guns away from us.  The Limbaugh/Hannity chorus has joined in all those accusations as well.

            Beck has even accused Obama of being a racist, insisting on both his own show and O’Reilly’s, that the President “hates” white people.  The Limbaugh/Hannity chorus has thus far eschewed going that far, but all of them pointedly avoided disavowing Beck.

            And then there is the Tea Party, whose admiration for the coiled snake “Don’t Tread on Me” has made it practically the movement’s logo.  These are the people who regularly show up at public meetings with pictures of Obama sporting a Hitler mustache, placards calling the President every buzzword bad name ever imagined, and, oh yeah, carrying assault rifles.

            There is no question that liberals and progressives despised George Bush.  There is no question they considered him unfit for the job, but even after it became patently clear that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and that the Bush administration had, if not explicitly lied, at least cherry-picked facts and grossly distorted truth, no liberal stood up in the halls of Congress and shouted “You lie” at the W.

            When the Bush administration rammed through a tax cut bill that gave a lopsided majority of the cut to the top 5% of incomes, liberals howled with righteous indignation, but they didn’t take to the airwaves of MSNBC to proclaim the apocalypse or the end of America as we know it.

            Perhaps most germane to today’s environment, they did not, in the run-up to the congressional elections of 2002, put gunsights on the districts of Republicans who had voted for the Bush tax cut.  Nor did they send them death threats or vandalize their offices. 

            That level of vitriol did not creep into the national discourse until January of 2009 when Obama was sworn in.

            I rehash all this because, since January 8, the Fox Republican machine along with Limbaugh and virtually every Republican officeholder has blathered indignantly about how Jared Loughner was clearly a deranged young man who had probably never heard of Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh.  And in that they are probably right.  Even more loudly, they have proclaimed  that there is absolutely no evidence to link anything said by any member of the conservative movement to Loughner’s action.  He was, they strongly contend, a “lone wolf”—as though that designation relieves the rest of the society from any responsibility for what happened.

            The right became nearly apoplectic in early 2009 when the Dept. of Homeland Security issued a report expressing grave concern about the proliferation of “right-wing extremist” groups and warning that violence up to and including insurrection was a distinct possibility from many of them.  Clearly the Obama administration, and DHS director Janet Napolitano had targeted  the conservative movement.  That’s what Beck, Limbaugh, Hannity and virtually every member of Fox noise proclaimed.  What they didn't mention was the report had been commissioned by the Bush administration, and all the material it contained had been gathered before Obama was even elected, much less inaugerated.

            What the right didn’t dispute was the existence of the armed militias, birther groups, neo-nazi groups and skinheads that the report identified.  They didn’t dispute them because the groups did exist and were becoming increasingly vocal about the need to “take back the country,” a phrase Beck and Palin had done much to popularize.

            One of the things that the report warned about was the inevitable emergence of “lone wolf” violence in an atmosphere so colored by martial rhetoric and images and so poisoned by the demonization of authority and government figures.

            I am more than willing to concede that Gabby Giffords and 20 other people were not shot on January 8 because of any specific thing Loughner heard from Beck or Palin or Limbaugh.  My guess is that most liberals and progressives would make that concession.

            What I would like to see in return is a willingness on the part of Beck, Palin, Limbaugh, Fox noise and the Tea Party in general to disagree as strongly as they want on matters of policy but stop making every disagreement both personal and somehow apocalyptic.  I would like to see them all agree to restrict what they say publically to things they have actual facts in hand to back up.  Stop arguing that Obama is not a citizen, for example, when every piece of physical evidence needed refutes that charge.  Stop claiming that Obama is planning to ban all guns (or imprison their owners in a FEMA concentration camp in Oregon, as Beck spent multiple programs claiming), when absolutely nothing he or anyone in his administration has said, done or even written about would indicate any such intention. Stop calling the Affordable Care Act socialized medicine when in fact it is the greatest boon to the private medical insurance industry any reasonable person could imagine.

           And cool it with all the militaristic rhetoric.  Stop talking about "Second Amendment remedies,"
the need to "reload" or the possibility that it's time for us all to become "armed and dangerous."

             There’s been lots of talk since January 8 about the need for more civility in the national discourse.  I wouldn’t argue that point, but in very large measure, the lack of civility we see everyday would disappear if all sides would agree to discuss, even debate, not partisan talking points or emotional buzzwords or dire conspiracies for which no shred of real evidence exists, but simply facts.  

            What I would most like to see is a proclamation from Roger Ailes at Fox that henceforth his pundits are not allowed to express an opinion on the air that has not been thoroughly fact-checked.  In one of my former lives, I worked in the newspaper business and then, as now (everywhere but Fox), nothing went in the paper that was not cleared by my editor, and his only concern was that I had proof that everything in the article was true. 

            Fox’s claim that editing the content of its opinion shows would amount to censorship is nonsense.  Just as there is no right to yell fire in a crowded theatre, there is no right to say things that  you know aren’t true  to millions of people, or even things you can’t prove ARE true. 

           

            The civility everyone professes to want in today’s discourse would be greatly served by a universal agreement to stick to, as Joe Friday used to say, “just the facts.”