Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Ideologues behaving badly . . . and TV as enabler

If this is the new standard of how we do politics -- and public policy -- in this country, I'd like to go back to reading and hearing about Paris Hilton, please.

In this clip from Hardball on MSNBC, we have a group of juveniles playing political games for profit, thrusting with faux moral outrage and parrying with bitchy disdain as the umpire and crowd leer and cheer: Cat fight! Cat fight! Cat fight! It's almost enough to get me started on that letter to Kim Jong Il, asking where the hell is that damned nuke-as-electromagnetic-pulse-weapon, already?

IT MERELY WOULD BE ANNOYING if not for the real issues facing the United States right now. As in the overrunning of this country by Mexican peasants illegally crossing our unsecured southern border, ready and willing to be exploited by unscrupulous American capitalists eager to drive down wages and run up profits.

All on the backs of blue-collar workers born here, raised here and fast becoming marginalized strangers here. Here in their own country.

The shocked, shocked Elizabeth Edwards and the snarky, catty Ann Coulter merely would be aggravating, if not for the thousands of American soldiers killed and maimed for no damn good reason in a deeply unjust, deeply unwise and deeply counterproductive war in Iraq. We sit on our fat asses in our overmortgaged suburban houses -- with SUVs we no longer can afford to drive -- and
we get this for bread and circuses.

When, of course, we're not watching the Perils of Paris on E!

IF YOU DON'T HAVE the stomach to watch the clip, I understand. You're probably saner than I am. Still, here's a bit of the transcript (you're not gonna get off THAT easy):

Edwards: I'm asking you politely to stop personal attacks.

Coulter: How bout you stop raising money on the Web page then?

Edwards: It didn't start it did not...

Coulter: No you don't have cause I don't mind

Edwards: It did not start with that you had a column a number of years ago

Coulter: OK, great the wife of a presidential candidate is calling in asking me to stop speaking...

Matthews: Let her finish the point...

Coulter: You're asking me to stop speaking, stop writing columns, stop writing your books.

Matthews: OK, Ann. Please.

Coulter: OK

Edwards: You wrote a column a couple years ago which made fun of the moment of Charlie Dean's death, and suggested that my husband had a bumper sticker on the back of his car that said ask me about my dead son. This is not legitimate political dialogue.

Coulter: That's now three years ago --

Edwards: It debases political dialogue. It drives people away from the process. We can't have a debate about issues if you're using this kind of language.

Coulter: Yeah why isn't John Edwards making this call?

Matthews: Well do you want to respond and we'll end this conversation?

Edwards: I haven't talked to John about this call.

Coulter: This is just another attempt for –

Edwards: I'm making this call as a mother. I'm the mother of that boy who died. My children participate -- these young people behind you are the age of my children. You're asking them to participate in a dialogue that's based on hatefulness and ugliness instead of on the issues and I don't think that's serving them or this country very well.

[Applause from the crowd]

Matthews: Thank you very much Elizabeth Edwards. (Turning to Coulter) Do you want to -- you have all the time in the world to respond.

Coulter: I think we heard all we need to hear. The wife of a presidential candidate is asking me to stop speaking. No.
FIRST OFF, Coulter's shtick was old a couple of years ago. No one likes a B-I witch, and that goes double when the B-I witch is pimping herself out to a political party or ideology.

That said, Coulter's column in which she allegedly "made fun of the moment of Charlie Dean's death, and suggested that my husband had a bumper sticker on the back of his car that said ask me about my dead son" wasn't that bad. It was well within the bounds of political discourse, broadly condemning pathos as politics.

It's horrible that Charlie Dean Edwards was killed in a car wreck. But a dead son is about as much reason to elect a man president as his wife's sadly incurable cancer. In other words, no reason at all.

But still, it was nice to watch Coulter squirm, then cover herself in ignominy.

AND BEFORE WE GO and actually buy Elizabeth Edwards' "heartfelt" plea for civility in politics and in public discourse, does anybody remember this?

Obviously not.

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