Monday, March 14, 2011

The New Civility Files

If anything good has come out the cavalcade of crappy behavior we've seen in Wisconsin over the past few weeks, it's this: I think we can safely say, Mr. New Civility, he dead.

It's what we like to call a Moment of Clarity. As you might remember, I wrote about the death threats that the Republicans in the Wisconsin state senate are facing. Meanwhile, Time Magazine offers this lovely headline:

Wisconsin's Governor Wins But Is He Still Dead Man Walker?

Considering the number of death threats that Walker has personally received, that's a particularly thoughtful headline, I'd say. Meanwhile, Walker went north for a fundraising event on Saturday night and encountered this scene, in which protestors/thugs were messing with the cars of people attending the fundraiser and writing down the license plate numbers. Since campaign donations are a member of public record, the thugs can easily find out the identities of people supporting Walker, so the writing down of license plate numbers is meant solely as intimidation.

Of course, the good news is that this sort of thuggery is receiving wide exposure and condemnation in the mainstream media, which were rightly concerned about threats of violence to politicians in the wake of the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords earlier this year. Wait, I stand corrected:

Not taking this seriously were ABC, CBS, MSNBC, NBC, and NPR. LexisNexis
and closed-caption dump searches of "Wisconsin and 'death threat'" produced zero
results for these so-called news outlets throughout the month of March.

I did my own Google search and found that, other than blogs, such reporting has been limited strictly to local media in Wisconsin. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has been consistently the best place to find out what's been happening, along with Ann Althouse's blog.

We've been through all this before. There's no point in complaining about the objectivity of the MSM, since they rarely pretend to be objective any more. If you are a conservative, you shouldn't ever expect to get a fair shake from the old media. If you hadn't understood that before, the last month has been highly educational.

The larger question is why the thuggery that's going on can continue without interruption. But that's another post.

4 comments:

W.B. Picklesworth said...

I'm not quite sure why they don't see that there will be repercussions for their actions. I'm not speaking crudely of some kind of reverse intimidation, but more along the lines of what Victor Davis Hanson sometimes speaks of, nemesis.

Put in more Hebrew terms, you reap what you sow. They are working to bring about precisely the kind of country that they decry, one where the government puts down demonstrators with force, where elections have no meaning, where the rich selfishly protect their own and tell everyone else to go to hell. It's discouraging that the people who could shine a light on this poor behavior to turn public opinion decisively against it are actively driving it.

Mr. D said...

They are working to bring about precisely the kind of country that they decry, one where the government puts down demonstrators with force, where elections have no meaning, where the rich selfishly protect their own and tell everyone else to go to hell.

It seems to me that a lot of these bien pensants do this because they don't really have a problem with any of it, so long as they are in control.

Bike Bubba said...

I grew up in union country, and it's just not pretty a lot of the time. All the times the UAW or USW would strike, bragging about how much it was costing the employers--and to this day UAW and USW workers often will act as if they had nothing to do with the bankruptcies of GM, Bethlehem Steel, and so on. Scary stuff

Gino said...

this would all stop if there was thuggery back.

when you tolerate abuse, you invite more abuse. the world just works that way.

see: westboro baptist church, and why they never protested at a black soldier's funeral held at the local AME.