Ode to Civility (We Hardly Knew Ye)

In the world of rhetorical politics, there used to be some kind of intellectual accountability. The weakening of civil discourse since 1998 has led to where we are today... where demagogues on one side can say something and be made to apologize for it, but the other side can get away with it. The example I have in mind is particularly galling.

Dick Durbin said some things about Guantanamo... in my book, comparing anything to the atrocities of the Nazis is little more than hyperbole. But I only spent a semester in graduate school studying plays the victims of the Holocuast wrote in the camps, so what do I know?

But the Republicans got their way today and squeezed an apology out of Durbin.

What's appalling about that is that this week on the House floor, Republican John Hostettler of Indiana made a gross and sweeping generalization of approximately 100 million Americans, saying that "Democrats can't help themselves when it comes to denigrating and demonizing Christians."

Really? I have a boatload of complaints about people who profess a faith of non-judgment then judge like there's no tomorrow, but I generally don't inflict my opinions of them on them. Yet I am a Democrat. There's lots of Democrats like me - who don't denigrate Christians or demonize Christians... or may even be Christians. Granted, not all Dems are Christian, but certainly not all Christians are Republicans.

The logical and rhetorical fallacies are too numerous to count.

However, I am not surprised that neither Hostettler nor the Republican leadership has even mentioned the possibility of an apology to Democrats. In Hostettler's worldview, Democrats are not worthy of an apology. It is just another in the long list of ways polity and civility and rhetoric have completely broken down.