re: #113 SanFranciscoZionist

Why should criticism of hateful rhetoric come across as partisan?

(Yes, that’s a loaded question, boys and girls, and you should run and tell a grownup. Don’t touch it!)

(I had those Eddie the Eagle coloring books from the NRA as a child.)

Criticism of hateful rhetoric is one thing. But authority figures should be wary of holding forth, in their capacity as authority, on subjects far from their expertise. Dupnik isn’t a clinical psychiatrist. How would he know, better than the rest of us, how much if any connection there might be between talk about “death panels”, say, and what Loughner did?

Governments make decisions about weighty matters. War and peace, life and death, wealth or poverty, hang in the balance. Any honest, serious discussion of the merits of competing agendas will involve drawing attention to the possible downside of the other agenda.

Those who are convinced that one position is correct and the other mistaken are always in the position of thinking that bad things are going to happen if the other side wins. Really bad things, sometimes. And these bad things do happen. We do have wars, and poverty, and so on, because we made bad choices. Or because we chose the least bad of a bad lot of options, depending how you saw it.

What is required, so that sane people will not draw the superficially “obvious” conclusion that the wrong side has got to be stopped, one way or another, is a meta-understanding.

It is better that the elected government go ahead and screw up, than that we fall to fighting over who should be in charge. There will be another election by and by.

It is a public duty, though not a legal duty, for opinion leaders of all stripes to uphold this meta-proposition, most especially when they’ve lost an electoral round and fear the worst.