Left's Call for a New Civility Still Not Working Out

The January 2011 shooting incident by apolitical nutter Jared Lee Loughner resulted in the near-fatal wounds to Democrat Gabrielle Giffords, and the murder of, among his other victims, George HW Bush appointed Federal Judge John M. Roll (who has since been airbrushed out of the event, to avoid muddying up the talking points). At the apex of the wilding spree that followed by “liberals” against anyone to the right of Barack Obama in the wake of the horrific incident, Jeff Poor of the Daily Caller spotted this moment on MSNBC: “National Journal’s Hirsh: Time for a moral sanction against gun metaphors similar to the ‘N’ word:” 

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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.”

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Unfortunately, not too many of Hirsh’s fellow leftists got the memo. In March, Bloomberg News ran this cover on Business Week:

If mere bullet point clip art can cause deaths, as Bloomberg alleged in January of 2011, aren’t illustrations of actual imaginary bullet holes even more potentially lethal?

But Bloomberg was far from the only “liberal” news source to jettison all of that ideology’s new civility talk; at the Tatler yesterday, Bryan Preston spots a journalism professor who believes, as Bryan paraphrases, “What America Really Needs Now Is a Violent Civil War to Kill Off the NRA:”

More honesty, this time from a Professor Christopher Swindell. But he starts his own honest heartcry with a lie.

Here it is. The NRA advocates armed rebellion against the duly elected government of the United States of America.

No, it doesn’t. The NRA advocates fidelity to the U.S. Constitution.

That’s treason, and it’s worthy of the firing squad.

If he was a professor of history, he might know that even Benedict Arnold didn’t get the firing squad.

The B.S. needs a serious gut check. We are not a tin pot banana republic where machine gun toting rebel groups storm the palace and depose the dictator.

We put the president in the White House. To support the new NRA president’s agenda of arming the populace for confrontation with the government is bloody treason. And many invite it gladly as if the African-American president we voted for is somehow infringing on their Constitutional rights.

Normally, I am a peaceable man, but in this case, I am willing to answer the call to defend the country. From them.

How about enlisting in the military, boss? I did it. So can you!

To turn the song lyric they so love to quote back on them, “We’ll put a boot in your —, it’s the American way.”

Except it won’t be a boot. It’ll be an M1A Abrams tank, supported by an F22 Raptor squadron with Hellfire missiles. Try treason on for size. See how that suits. And their assault arsenal and RPGs won’t do them any good.

The piece speaks eloquently for itself. But the real kicker comes at the end:

Swindell is a professor of journalism.

Of course he is. Even though he can barely write.

Turns out he’s a professor of journalism at Marshall University. He believes that the Tea Party hates America, because it objects to Obama’s debt policies which are wrecking the country. He published his personal email address on this article about the Boston bombing, to which he reacted as a typical liberal reacts.

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Click over to Bryan’s post at the Tatler for Swindell’s video on “Why we’re not getting along,” which was recorded in February of 2011. “As a progressive, I want government to work for all people…maybe it’s time to start talking about formidable differences, and start talking about what we have in common our great republic,” Swindell told YouTube viewers a month after the Giffords incident.

As Bryan notes, “That was in 2011. In 2013, he’s pushing for civil war to murder millions of law-abiding Americans who don’t happen to wear his political stripe.”

But hey, he didn’t use clip art, right?

Update: Related thoughts on Swindell’s soothing civility from Stacy McCain.

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