Past performance is no guarantee of future results:
National Journal’s Michael Hirsh wants to raise the bar on decorum to an entirely new level. On Thursday’s MSNBC airing of “Hardball,” Hirsh told host Chris Matthews certain “gun” terms should be stricken from political discourse and referred to instances where Minnesota Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann and former Republican Nevada senatorial candidate Sharon Angle used such off-limits language.
“Well we don’t want any more duels and thankfully that was the last one,” Hirsh said. “[B]ut the point I was trying to make is you can draw a line particularly in the use of certain kinds of metaphors. The use of gun metaphors – killing, murdering, taking out, which was another metaphor for a – Michele Bachmann used in one of her statements, Sharon Angle – the Nevada Senate candidate’s now infamous comment about quote, unquote, ‘second amendment remedies’ to deal with the problem Harry Reid, her opponent.”
His proposal? Make such language inappropriate in the same racial slurs are inappropriate.
That’s the kind of language I think we got to have a hard think about now,” Hirsh said. “Do we really want to continue to use that kind of language at these levels? Or, should there be kind of a social sanction, not a legal one, but a moral sanction in the way that we’ve stopped using certain epithets like the ‘n’-word public forums. Stop using that kind of language, those kinds of metaphors.”
— As transcribed by the Daily Caller, January 21st, 2011.
The era of new civility on MSNBC certainly didn’t last very long, did it? Flash-forward to this summer:
— Newsbusters, June 26, 2012.
— Newsbusters, today.
Matthews’ crude rhetoric and love violent metaphors reminds me of the 1930s in another country, to borrow from a line uttered a couple of years ago by a pundit known as…Chris Matthews.
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