There are few if any signs that the left’s unhinged behavior in the wake of Donald Trump’s electoral victory is subsiding, even among those in positions of significant authority and responsibility. In addition to CEOs and university professors, we can now add the category of “high-ranking journalist” to the list of those who, since Trump’s victory, have been unable to keep their violent emotional inclinations in check.
Michael Hirsh, Politico’s national editor, who has previously served as the foreign editor and chief diplomatic correspondent for Newsweek, has resigned after publishing the home addresses of an Alt-Right leader and proposing that he and someone with whom he was corresponding visit the closer of those two addresses with “baseball bats.”
—“Politico Editor Michael Hirsh Resigns; Proposed Attacking Alt-Right Leader With ‘Baseball Bats,’” Tom Blumer, NewsBusters, yesterday.
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.”
— “National Journal’s Hirsh: Time for a moral sanction against gun metaphors similar to the ‘N’ word,” Jeff Poor, the Daily Caller, January 21, 2011. As I wrote at the time here at Ed Driscoll.com, nobody tell Hirsh all of the “racial metaphors” in use every day on the NFL Channel.
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