History in the Faking
MISS MANNERS MISSES MANNERS
…but Jonah Goldberg politely asks
When was this Golden Age of civility?
Was this glorious era of politeness during George W. Bush’s presidency? Funny, that’s not how I remember it.
Goldberg goes on to list the Clarence Thomas hearings and Clinton Bimbo Impeachment of the ’90’s, the “amiable dunce” Reagan ’80’s, the Ayers/Dohrn bombing ’70’s , the Assassination ’60’s, the McCarthy 50’s, etc.
He doesn’t mention it, but the ’40’s saw FDR accused of Pearl Harbor Trutherism. Truman both dished out some pretty rough demagoguery to Republicans and took some from Dixiecrats for integrating the armed forces. And in Hollywood, there were Commie labor riots:
As actor Kirk Douglas remembered it, “Thousands of people fought in the middle of the street with knives, clubs, battery cables, brass knuckles and chains.”
Goldberg:
How about the 1910s, when Woodrow Wilson threw political opponents in jail? Or in 1919, when he dubbed “hyphenated Americans” (i.e. German-Americans) traitors? “I cannot say too often — any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic. . . . If I can catch any man with a hyphen in this great contest I will know that I have got an enemy of the Republic.”
Obama is our first hyphenated-President in a way that even Catholic JFK was not. And not just as an “African-American“. He is the first to go completely through our educational institutions since the Hyphenated-Left has held sway. When academia teaches students to be loyal first to their own pigment or identity group and suspicious of the larger culture, that is the very definition of questioning patriotism.
Indeed, for all the hyperventilating cries of “How dare you question my patriotism!”, the Left has literally questioned the very basis of patriotism, the nation-state. And held up Internationalism as a higher value. He is an International-American.
He was exposed to Muslim cultures through his father and step-father; he’s a Muslim-ish-American. Who lived in Indonesia and traveled to Pakistan–a Third-World-American. He absorbed the vicarious victimhood of McCarthyism from all the socialists in his life. A Victim-of-America-American.
So why are you, as a Wondering-American, still scratching your head as to why he keeps siding against America and freedom, and with foreign governments, the UN, Third-World grifters, mullahs and Socialists?
Anyway, all of Goldberg’s examples pale in comparison to the Civil War of the 1860’s and our original civil war called the American Revolution of the 1770’s.
[A] lot of the complaints about incivility today are really complaints from the people in power or their supporters in the media, aimed at the folks who won’t shut up and get with their program. … Democracy is about disagreement, arguments. Citizenship in America requires speaking your mind. Civility came to mean politeness in the 16th century; before that it meant being a citizen. … It seems to me that authentic civility requires some incivility.
Thank you very kindly for listening.
Jerk-face.
- Entries
What IS special is the four paragraphs in between; the first three offer a précis of why Conservatives, and patriots in general, distrust this man as a "real American" and the fourth goes to why it matters. I especially like how it doesn't go into race or teh BIRTH CERTIFICATE!!1 like the caricature of conservatives I keep getting my nose rubbed into.
I have quoted that...