Right Wing Nut House

My first article is up at David Horowitz’s FrontPage.com where I look at the real motive behind Bill Clinton’s sudden interest in political speech inciting violence:

A sample:

Mr. Clinton’s concern for the quality of our nation’s political discourse is touching, if not a little curious. Apparently, the avalanche of hate, violent rhetoric, and invective against President Bush for 8 years didn’t pose much of a danger in his mind. Otherwise, he would have said something, right?

During the Bush years, major figures on the left referred to the “Bush regime” as “fascist,” while insisting that the president was trying to set up a dictatorship. Mr. Bush was regularly hung in effigy at protest rallies, and something of an “assassination chic” arose where the killing of the president became a parlor game for some of the president’s more hip critics.

I don’t recall Mr. Clinton — or anyone else on the left for that matter — raising the specter of political violence as a result of that fantastically exaggerated, hateful rhetoric. Few, if any in the mainstream media raised an alarm that such unscrewed looniness would incite or enable some left wing kook to act out his violent impulses. Not even as the left en mass were screaming about Bush “destroying the country” did we hear a peep from the former president about “demonization” of Bush by his liberal allies.

The point being, Mr. Clinton is engaging in an effort to silence and delegitimize critics of President Obama by hinting at violence that hasn’t occurred yet. He is, in effect, setting the stage for a massive backlash against the right and tea partiers if, God forbid, some nutcase were to listen to the voices in his head telling him to kill people and act on those impulses. If this were to occur, we would once again be treated to the entire left playing amateur psychologist and trying to guess the insane person’s “motivations.” The fact that most crazed gunmen don’t need any outside stimuli to perpetrate their crimes is beside the point. Even the idea that the fringe right character plotting mayhem cares what some internet blogger has to say about Obama gains currency when the left engages in its politically motivated hunt for blame.

I don’t discount the idea that speech can lead to violence entirely. I detail the Warren Commission’s efforts to quantify the extraordinary hatred directed against Kennedy in the months leading up to the assassination. Did Oswald feel enabled by the level of vitriol directed against JFK? In the end, the Commission took the politically expedient route and only made passing mention of the idea.

But it is nuts to equate the atmosphere in Dallas with anything having to do with opposition to Obama today among mainstream conservatives. Clinton is trying to cut off debate while setting up a huge backlash against the right if any nutcase decides to act out his radical impulses in a violent manner.

Read the whole thing.

This article originally appears at The Moderate Voice

Pajamas Media paid my way to New Orleans last weekend to attend the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, and I am just today recovered enough from my trip home on Sunday to write something about it.

The journey back to Chicago from New Orleans was actually more like an Icelandic Saga than the return leg of a round trip. The only thing missing is Odin hurling thunderbolts at the airplane, although we were lucky enough to actually fly through a Boomer when landing in Atlanta on Thursday.

I much prefer direct flights but that wouldn’t do for PJM. So off to Atlanta from Chicago I went on Thursday last week, failing to see the logic in traveling to the east coast in order to fly to a city located in the middle of the country. I’m sure it had to do with the “Hub” system that has been the death of air travel in America. At any rate, a one hour, forty five minute flight turned into a half day’s aggravation. As it was, I barely caught the connecting flight to New Orleans because we were late taking off from O’Hare.

But all that pales in comparison to the four airport, 3 airplane torture I was subjected to on Sunday. I spent more time in layovers - 4.5 hours - than I did in flight time - 4 hours. From New Orleans, I flew to Houston where a 2.5 hour layover awaited. Then, boarding a jump jet, we headed off to Dallas, another hour layover, and then the excruciating experience of being sandwiched between a man and a woman who were even larger than my 250 pound bulk for the final leg back to Chicago.

After spending the weekend endlessly walking through the conference venue, I spent Sunday endlessly walking through 4 airports. My legs almost fell off when I got home and even a hot bath didn’t help much.

Enough of my ordeal, what about the conference?

Partisans will see and hear what they want to, but I really did make an effort to step back and listen to the speeches and converse with delegates as someone not beholden to party or ideology. Some of what I heard disturbed me. Some things cheered me. Mostly, I was impressed with the confidence exuded by those present.

Is it misplaced? Some argue that the GOP has peaked too early, that the Scott Brown victory in Massachusetts was the high water mark of the GOP comeback.

Forgive me if I find that laughably wishful thinking. The fact is, there is something happening in the hinterlands of America that those of us who spend our days wrapped in this little internet cocoon can barely fathom. Millions of people - not just Republicans or conservatives - are aroused. Many are angry but many more are worried. There is a widespread belief that the government of the United States has gone off the rails and is literally out of control. In short, what ever tenuous connection the people had with Washington has been broken.

Assigning blame is not my intent. In fact, the media narrative about the tea party people is so remarkably wrong, it would be humorous in almost any other context. Every single tea partier I talked to - and you couldn’t move in New Orleans without stepping on one - is as mad at the Republicans as they are the Democrats.

Every single one.

Even if they vote Republican in 2010, the GOP will be on notice; reform or it will be your turn to get kicked out. This attitude is reflected by the polls in that while GOP fortunes may have surged, the number of people who identify with the party has remained relatively constant - about 27% of the electorate. Voters have not forgiven Republicans their mistakes. For the GOP to assume otherwise and then get to Washington next year only to carry out their own spending plans, would be the height of folly.

This emotional reaction of the tea partiers and others who may identify with the movement but have no desire to join, has little to do with health care reform or even spending. Opposition to those issues are symptoms of a much broader concern; the unmooring of government from the tenets of the Constitution.

I wrote about this aspect in my PJ Media column on Sunday:

But there was also something most unusual about the conference: an uncommon amount of talk and discussion of the United States Constitution. Ordinary people from all walks of life, not a constitutional scholar or lawyer among them, are actually trying to come to grips with the fundamental meaning and purpose of our founding document.

Has such a thing happened since the debates over ratification? If the numbers of tea partiers can be believed — and they were omnipresent at this gathering — perhaps millions of citizens are reading the Constitution and trying to place the actions taken by our government within the confines of our founding document’s strictures. And judging by the numerous conversations I had with delegates, bloggers, and just ordinary folk, there is a profound feeling of unease about not just what Obama and the Democrats have done to expand the power of the federal government, but Republicans as well. Contrary to what the left would like to establish as conventional wisdom — that the tea party movement is a wholly partisan operation — the anger people are demonstrating about spending is directed at both parties, almost equally.

But becoming emotional about spending is only a symptom of what bothers most people. If you start to talk to them about spending, inevitably the conversation will turn to the Constitution and their understanding of how that document should be interpreted.

How dare they, you might say. What do they know about 221 years of constitutional law? What do they know about the great and important decisions of the Supreme Court that have defined, redefined, and reinterpreted our founding document through the decades? How can they possibly intelligently address the minutiae, the subtlety, the beautiful strands of logic that have painstakingly been built up, layer upon layer, as our civilization has groped with ways to live together in justice and peace?

It may seem to some a quaint exercise in good citizenship for these millions to wrestle with the such convoluted and complex questions as the meaning and reach of the commerce clause or the constitutionality of the individual mandate to buy health insurance. The condescension is misplaced — and totally unwarranted.

What’s really at work here is the mystery of faith and how it can not only move mountains, but perhaps save a country from its own foolishness.

The reason for this massive interest in the Constitution may be seen as an attempt to reconnect the people with their government. Childlike in its simplicity, this very serious concentration on our founding document by people from all walks of life is an attempt to try and understand what government is doing in the context of the only blueprint we have for how to keep our liberty. It has engaged the sensibilities of the public in a way not seen for a very long time.

Some of the speakers sought to take advantage of this re-examination of the Constitution by trying to make the point that the Obama administration, the Democrats, the liberals - all were actually against the Constitution and were seeking to take away the liberty of the people, to enslave them.

Texas Governor Rick Perry went so far as to define the powers of the federal government thusly: Perry believes the federal government’s responsibilities should be limited to:

Have a strong military, secure our borders, and deliver the mail on time. And that’s it. …

And until you can get those three right, how about leaving everything else alone?

Few in the tea party movement would go that far. And the ones who do could rightly be termed “anti-government” rather than small government conservatives.

There was also some worrying rhetoric about the ultimate loyalty and intentions of Obama and the Democrats. Here, many more if not most in the tea party movement agree that the Democrats are basically un-American with some going as far as saying that they want to ruin the country. This is, as I point out, the Age of the Ideologue in America so perhaps it’s understandable, if not a little depressing that this attitude is so widespread.

For now, the Republicans don’t quite know what to do with these people. They are of a different breed than other activists in that they don’t seem to want to give their loyalty to any party or party establishment. Eventually, this movement will be co-opted and absorbed by the GOP. But until then, they will give the Republican party leadership fits with their constant badgering about first principles and constitutional order.

This article originally appears on The Moderate Voice

Clive Crook is making way too much sense:

A moderate and intelligent opposition to the Democrats’ policies is badly needed. Apparently, nobody in the Republican party aims to provide it. Republican leaders seem intent on presenting the party’s angriest, most stupid and least tolerant face. Some leading Republicans who are moderate by temperament and conviction – John McCain, for instance – are being pushed to the right in primary election contests with more conservative opponents. Others, such as Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty, are disowning their previously expressed views or just keeping their heads down.

Republicans are right to say that the Obama administration has over-reached. Democrats failed to convince the country that their healthcare reform was the right solution to an obvious and pressing problem, yet passed their law anyway. Many voters are angry about this, and entitled to be. Also, despite the administration’s denials, the reform will most likely add to public borrowing, which was on a dangerously high trajectory to begin with. Again, they are right to be concerned.

Disenchantment with Mr Obama and the Democrats is especially pronounced in the political centre. (Conservatives, of course, were dismayed before the evidence was even in.) You might have thought this would commend a centrist platform to the Republican party approaching November’s mid-term elections. Swing voters decide who wins, and they were up for grabs. Why are Republicans steering to the right?

Why, indeed. The easy answer is that the entire conversation on the right is being driven by ideologues who profit personally or politically from fearmongering, exaggeration, deceptive analogy, pandering to stereotypes, and sometimes, outright lying about the opposition.

What’s worse, the ideologues actually believe the rot their pushing. If it were simply a matter of saying whatever it took to get elected, or talking wildly about the evils of the Obama Administration in order to sell mattresses on the radio, that would be understandable. Such demonstrations of human frailty would actually be a relief, considering where these sometimes bizarre critiques of the Democrats are leading the GOP.

The Democrats do the same thing, of course. Referring to conservatives as racists or Nazis is par for the course these days on the left. I would certainly call that an exaggeration, and using deceptive analogies between the tea partiers and southern resisters to civil rights is outrageous to anyone who knows anything about that movement. So too, the political lie that the GOP has no new ideas, or that it doesn’t offer alternatives to the Democratic agenda. This simply isn’t true and the fact that Democrats say this with a straight face while deliberately burying bills offered by Republicans that are serious efforts to address our problems is maddening. Both parties indulge in this childish name calling and fearmongering, which is Illustration No. I of what is wrong with political discourse today.

But aside from allusions to a “vast right wing conspiracy,” the Democrats keep their stupidity on a familiar level - that of the normal eye gouging and nut twisting that has been occurring in politics since our founding. Making the other fellow appear as Satan may not be uplifting to political dialogue but is SOP when trying to score points against your opponent.

What makes the attack rhetoric so moronic from the GOP is that much of it is tinged with wild eyed hints of dark conspiracies and the evil machinations of unseen forces. Obama is out to “destroy the country,” is a familiar theme. If you want to know how something so nonsensical could be close to mainstream thought on the right, just listen to talk radio. Rush Limbaugh’s pet theory is that Obama and the Democrats are intentionally trying to ruin our economy so that we all become dependent on government for our lives and thus, become Democratic voters overnight.

Think of it; 20 million people listen to this kind of crap from Limbaugh everyday:

The people that run our country now have a much closer proximity and they’re much closer to the world’s tyrants and dictators than they are closer to the people who founded the country. This is not accidental. They have chosen it. This is the ideology that they have chosen. This is what’s best for them. And you’re going to learn this if you stay focused and stay interested and keep learning as you grow older, you’re going to learn this. You’re gonna learn that they’re not innocent idiots. They are dangerous, devious central planners who have designs on everybody’s liberty and freedom. That’s what matters most to them because that’s where they derive their power.

There is no response possible to such idiocy. One can only marvel at the flight from reality that is necessary to say this and worse, believe it. It’s as if millions of conservatives don’t find life interesting enough and have to invent these extraordinarily dramatic reasons to oppose Obama when the simple fact that the president is a far left liberal Democrat should suffice for most reasonable conservatives.

Mr. Crook doesn’t see much reasonableness from the right:

The Democratic party, for all its faults, is a broad coalition. There is such a thing as a conservative Democrat. Ideologically, the Republican party is shrinking even as it gains popular support. The parties used to overlap in the middle. That is the part of the political spectrum where trade-offs can be admitted, where balances between what voters want and are willing to pay for can be struck, and where fiscal conservatives usually live.

Liberal Republicans were already a rare species. Healthcare reform, and the electorate’s reaction to the Democrats’ plan, seems to have extinguished the breed entirely. With that proposal now law, the acid test is tax reform. Is there a Republican out there willing to support a simplification of the tax system that, while lowering marginal rates, raises revenues significantly above their historic average? Even after every plausible economy on the spending side has been made, that is going to be necessary. So far as I am aware, not a single prominent Republican is willing to say so.

Why? Because reaching out to the center as a Republican is a zero sum game. For every centrist you pick up, you lose two conservatives who accuse you of being a “RINO” or “squishy.” Always looking for a sure thing, politicians would rather gather the votes from their base and hope that enough centrists come of their own volition rather than make an effort to actively seek them out.

And I’m not sure many Republicans would go for a “centrist agenda” anyway. Neither would many Democratic politicians opt for a middle of the road posture. This is the age of the ideologue in American politics and there simply isn’t room for reason, logic, and the desire to work together as a nation to solve our problems,

It was headline news this past weekend at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference when Ron Paul said Barack Obama is not a socialist, despite even Newt Gingrich using the “S” word to describe Obama at the same venue. That is the significance of having ideology govern a political party. Most Americans do not see the president that way and as I point out here, calling Obama a socialist flies in the face of the accepted definition of the word:

I detest conservatives throwing around the words “socialism” and “Marxism” when it comes to Obama as much as I get angry when idiot liberals toss around the word “fascist” when describing conservatives. I’m sorry but this is ignorant. It bespeaks a lack of knowledge of what socialism and communism represent as well as an ignorance of simple definitions. Obama will not set up a government agency to plan the economy. He will not as president, require businesses to meet targets for production. He will not outlaw profit. He will not put workers in charge of companies (unless it is negotiated between unions and management. It is not unheard of in this country and the practice may become more common in these perilous economic times.).

An Obama presidency will have more regulation, more “oversight,” more interference from government agencies, more paperwork for business, less business creation, fewer jobs, fewer opportunities. It will be friendlier to unions, more protectionist, and will require higher taxes from corporations (who then will simply pass the tax bill on to us, their customers). But government won’t run the economy. And calling Obama a “socialist” simply ignores all of the above and substitutes irrationalism (or ignorance) for the reality of what an Obama presidency actually represents; a lurch to the left that will be detrimental to the economy, bad for business, but basically allow market forces to continue to dominate our economy.

I wrote that before the election in 2008. I still believe it despite the fact that national health insurance reform puts us on the road to socialized medicine, the unforeseen consequences of which could lead to the kinds of government control most feared by conservatives. But we’re not there yet - not by a long, long shot. And the slippery slopes on such a road, if recognized, can be avoided if conservatives keep their heads and fight against them.

Unfortunately, conservatives are not keeping their heads. Hysterical shouting and hand wringing about evil Obama may work this time around, as Crook points out, because the vast middle of the country is in a mood to punish the Democrats. But come 2012, someone on the right is going to have to come up with a rational, reasoned critique of Obama’s policies that the moderate righties and libertarians won’t think is the mouthings of some crazed paranoid inhabiting an alternate universe.

Otherwise, the GOP may find itself marginalized and on the outs for a long time to come.

This article originally appears in the American Thinker

Last month, the Texas State Board of Education tentatively approved changes in social studies’ texts that set off much wailing and gnashing of teeth on the academic and cultural left.

Would that changes made by the very same Board of Education back in 1997 elicited similar cries of outrage from the left when several jaw-dropping alterations were made to Texas school books in order to please liberal constituencies. The complaints back then came mostly from conservatives who saw our national narrative altered in order to appease the multi-culturalists. It appears that now that the shoe is on the other foot, a much bigger issue must be made of these ideologically inspired changes in history curriculum. Why this is so speaks more to our culture wars than any attempt to improve the accuracy of textbooks.

There is nothing new in complaining about the ideological tilt in the study of American history in our nation’s schools. And the debate certainly isn’t limited to Texas, as one recent poll shows nearly half of American parents with children in primary or secondary public schools believing that history textbooks are inaccurate while fully 60% believe that “most school textbooks are more focused on being politically correct than ensuring accuracy.”

There is a great misunderstanding by us laypeople over the significance of certain historical events and personalities. The confusion comes about when we start conflating the study of history with the teaching of history. The two are mutually exclusive propositions with the former being concerned with discovering what happened, and the latter concerned with passing on knowledge. It is the question of what knowledge gleaned from the study of history should be passed on that creates these ideological food fights and drives both sides to emphasize favored constituencies at the expense of objective accuracy.

Where we begin to get into trouble is in failing to recognize the enormous complexity of our history and substitute a “special narrative” that highlights a point of view driven by politics rather than scholarship. In this sense, it isn’t necessarily inaccurate to downplay the role of Thomas Jefferson in our founding as the Texas School Board voted to do last month. There will be nothing historically false in the text about Jefferson. He just won’t receive what many historians believe should be the kind of attention he deserves in the classroom.

Is this inaccurate? It can be argued as such but is perhaps not as egregious a sin as, for example, devoting more classroom time to the fight for civil rights as is spent examining the Revolutionary War. No doubt civil rights history is important but we should be constrained to point out that there would be no civil rights movement in the United States unless there was an independent nation to begin with. Such logic escapes most ideologues who seek to put their imprint on what our children learn of American history regardless of common sense or proportion.

Time is the key. There are only so many school days, so many lesson plans, so many personalities and events that can be squeezed into a school year. This invites this kind of controversy that plays out across the nation when states seek to alter history textbooks. By de-emphasizing Jefferson, the Texas School Board is going to give Jefferson Davis’ inaugural address a fresh look by comparing it with Lincoln’s address. There will be nothing “inaccurate” about this except that some historians believe it to be a waste of time to even make the effort when other events and people in American history cry out for recognition.

Other specific changes authorized by the Texas School Board deal with current arguments in the academy over issues like the role of religion in our founding. The passion of evangelical Christians who seek to justify a more dominant role for religion in civic society by interpreting the past in a less thorough manner than many academic historians may be admirable in some quarters, but is less than welcome when applied to changing history textbooks. The conservative Christians are shouldering their way into an academic debate by seeking to simplify a very complex issue in ways that border on dishonesty. There may indeed be differing interpretations about what the founders believed about the separation of Church and State. But by not recognizing opposing views, the Texas School Board is choosing a winner in a contest for which none has been declared.

Indeed, conservatives seeking to put their imprint on the curriculum - just as liberals are known to do - are demonstrating a basic ignorance of history as an academic discipline. Ron Briley, Assistant Headmaster, Sandia Preparatory School, writing for the History News Network, gives both a teacher’s perspective and an historian’s sense of proportion to the problem:

The question is not simply which facts, but whose facts. It is a matter of perspective. The history of Western settlement may differ depending upon whether the story is told from the point of view of a pioneer or Native American. In fact, it seems to be the concept of multiple perspectives that most frightens those seeking to impose absolute standards upon the schools.

What Briley is proposing is the radical notion that history should be taught to children in such a way as to develop their abilities to think for themselves by presenting differing perspectives on the same event:

It is the fostering of critical thinking to which the Texas State Board seems most opposed. Rather than encouraging students to investigate the role of religion in the forging of the American nation, students are instructed to accept that the founders envisioned a Christian nation. According to the Texas standards, the Second Amendment is to be treated as an absolute, rather than presenting alternative interpretations and letting students reach their own conclusions. After all, the First Amendment freedom of speech is not recognized by the courts as absolute. It is important to examine the role of Ronald Reagan in ending the Cold War, but it is equally essential to appreciate the emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union, for American history must be placed within the global context in which students will be living during the twenty-first century.

Teaching is not dictation. It is not the simple transference of knowledge from one person to another. That kind of straight line thinking leads to automatons, not critically thinking, independent minded citizens. Rather, teaching should be about encouraging student’s minds to expand and grow. The very best teachers lay out a path that motivates students to choose their own road in the journey to enlightenment. Those are the teachers you remember from your own school experience. The process of learning was almost effortless, and there was excitement not in passing a test or achieving some class award, but in the sheer joy of knowing something you did not know before.

But conservatives in Texas and liberals in many other places don’t quite see it that way. Their notion of “education” consists of imparting an ideologically tinged set of “facts” in the classroom that seek to narrow rather than expand a student’s mind. As it is with elevating the role of Ronald Reagan in ending the cold war (at the expense of Gorbachev who many historians believe had a large role in that process), so it is with the over-hyping of the role some minorities have played in American history in order to slavishly satisfy an instinct to be politically correct. Both approaches are wrong. Both lose sight of how American history should be taught. And both fail to grasp the simple notion that there isn’t enough time to fully satisfy everyone’s idea of what our children should learn.

Most people who are interested in American history learn far more about this country from reading outside the classroom than inside. The great biographies of great men and women, along with compelling narrative histories about great events fill in the gaps in our knowledge that a limited classroom experience put there. Some of us may even be curious enough to read more academic treatments of history where the great debates over people and events reveal schisms that date to the founding of the republic.

It is perhaps too much to ask to divorce ideology entirely from decisions on what to teach our students about the American experiment. These school board decisions are, after all, exercises in democracy. If the board members were not elected directly by the people, they are appointed by someone who was.

But we can ask those responsible for more forbearance as it relates to what should be one of the goals of teaching American history to our children in the first place; the opportunity to pass on to the next generation the incredible story of our founding and growth while inculcating a national identity in the minds of those who will be responsible one day for keeping and holding that patrimony of liberty.

This article originally appears at The Moderate Voice

They were typical Americans of their time; proud, independent, industrious - and obscenely racist in their view toward the black race. They embarked on, what in hindsight, was a suicidal rebellion against the United States government and fought with uncommon courage and a determination that eventually precipitated the extermination of their way of life, and the economy upon which they all depended.

But not until 600,000 lay dead and 4 million bondsmen were unmoored from their familiar surroundings and habits of life - set adrift in a country that despised them - did the South finally surrender. Ever since, we haven’t quite known what to do with them. Were they evil racists, forever stained by the sin of having kept slaves? Or were they gallant knights forever holding their flag high despite the fact that they were fighting in a lost, ignoble cause?

Today’s Southern Traditionalists hold that the rebels should be remembered for their courage in battle, as should the sacrifices made by citizens of the confederacy be recalled. There are several Southern patriot organizations that care for confederate graves, tend the statues of confederate heroes, and generally keep the flame of memory alive for each generation who grows up below the Mason-Dixon line.

Like it or not, agree with the traditionalists or not, this is part of our heritage. You can’t just erase from history the millions of southerners who lived, fought, and died during the Civil War because of slavery. Neither can we erase the original sin of slavery as it was practiced in the south, or the casual, nauseating racism so commonly displayed in the north. It is nearly forgotten today that several regiments of union soldiers deserted as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation and with the exception of some New England regiments, most of the union army was, if not opposed to freeing the slaves, then certainly were ambivalent about the matter.

Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell has cracked open a hornets nest by re-instituting a controversial recognition of this heritage by declaring April to be “Confederate History Month” in Virginia.

The two previous Democratic governors had refused to issue the mostly symbolic proclamation honoring the soldiers who fought for the South in the Civil War. McDonnell (R) revived a practice started by Republican governor George Allen in 1997. McDonnell left out anti-slavery language that Allen’s successor, James S. Gilmore III (R), had included in his proclamation.

McDonnell said Tuesday that the move was designed to promote tourism in the state, which next year will mark the 150th anniversary of the start of the war. McDonnell said he did not include a reference to slavery because “there were any number of aspects to that conflict between the states. Obviously, it involved slavery. It involved other issues. But I focused on the ones I thought were most significant for Virginia.”

The proclamation was condemned by the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus and the NAACP. Former governor L. Douglas Wilder called it “mind-boggling to say the least” that McDonnell did not reference slavery or Virginia’s struggle with civil rights in his proclamation. Though a Democrat, Wilder has been supportive of McDonnell and boosted his election efforts when he declined to endorse the Republican’s opponent, R. Creigh Deeds.

What then, do we do with these people? How should we see them? They are our countrymen, after all, most of them fighting not for slavery but to protect their homes from what they perceived was an invading army. More than 90% of southern soldiers didn’t even own slaves. Dimly, they may have been fighting also for the maintenance of a way of life - a life made possible by slavery. But few historians wouldn’t argue that the southern soldier - dirt farmers and landless tenants for the most part - gave no more thought to preserving slavery as the northern soldier gave to freeing them.

Of course, this doesn’t let the confederate government off the hook. If you want a villain, look no further than Jefferson Davis and the Fire Eaters in Congress who agitated for secession when the election of 1860 went against them. One might argue that it was the nation of the confederacy that was evil and deserves our disapprobation in that the preservation of slavery was both a cultural and economic necessity to them. The institution was so weak that they feared anyone who spoke of limiting it in any way. So they worked themselves up into a fine paranoid lather over what Lincoln might do as president and followed South Carolina over the cliff - all 11 states.

There are those who, for a variety of political and cultural reasons, wish to lump all southerners who fought or supported the Civil War together and brand them “bad as the Nazis.” This kind of generalized condemnation means that there is the belief that we should refuse to recognize a common heritage with those who fought for the confederacy.

I don’t see how this is possible. McDonnell is dead wrong not to mention slavery - preposterously wrong by saying that he focused on issues that “were most significant for Virginia.” Of course slavery was a very significant issue and it’s dishonest for him to say otherwise. Beyond that, McDonnell’s not mentioning slavery is a slap in the face to African Americans.

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

A lot of you have e-mailed me to note that Virginia governor Bob McDonnell has decided to honor those who fought to preserve, and extend, white supremacy. I don’t really have much to say. The GOP is, effectively, the party of willfully unlettered Utopians. It is the party of choice for those who believe global warming is a hoax, that humans roamed the earth with dinosaurs, and that homosexuals should work harder at not being gay.

That the party of unadulterated quackery also believes that Birth Of A Nation is more true to the Civil War than Battle Cry Of Freedom, is to be expected. Ignorance does not respect boundaries. It is, at times, qualified and those who know more, often struggle to say more. But people who believe that the Census is actually a covert attempt to put Americans in concentration camps, are also likely to believe that slavery was incidental to the Civil War.

Interesting that Coates takes the most fringiest of the fringe beliefs (that’s actually the first I’ve heard of the census being used to imprison Obama opponents and I pride myself on keeping track of the latest lunacy of the right - a sure sign that Coates is being hysterical) and smears his opponents. I doubt very few conservatives who might approve of this recognition of our common heritage by McDonnell believe in a version of the war as portrayed in Griffith’s Birth of a Nation as opposed to McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom. Coates may have forgotten - or may not have even read - McPherson. If he had, he would know that the historian went to great pains to document northern racism - the kind of casual obscenities that appeared in Democratic newspapers where (talk about weird), it was printed as fact that Abraham Lincoln was 1/4 black and cartoons of the president routinely portrayed him as a monkey.

But that doesn’t fit the narrative so forget about it.

Truth be told, both sides were fighting for “white supremacy.” Any doubts along those lines would be answered by the draft riots in New York city in July of 1863. Irish immigrants, fearing that an influx of cheap black labor as a result of emancipation would take their jobs, ravaged the city, pulling blacks out of their houses or attacking them on the street, lynching several dozen. The proximate cause of the trouble was the draft, and the ability of the fairly well off to buy there way out of military service. The Irish were refusing to fight in a war that they believed would lead to their ruin.

The New York Irish were not alone. The feeling was widespread in the north, fed by racist Democrats who sought to make political hay of these fears. The idea that white northerners were fighting for black equality is belied by Lincoln himself, who casually remarked to a friend that there may even be a few freed blacks who might be smart enough to vote.

The northern soldier, like his southern counterpart, had very personal reasons for joining up and fighting. In the end, they were all Americans. You can blame the soldiers of the south for the sins of their government - or excuse northern soldiers because of the more noble, although far from perfect goals of the Lincoln administration. But you cannot ignore the common heritage for which we are all a part. The good, the bad, the noble, the base - all our stellar qualities and all the imperfections that shame us - matters not when remembering what unites us; those “mystic chords of memory stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land.”

McDonnell is a fool for not including any reference to slavery or even civil rights in his proclamation. But I don’t fault him for the effort to acknowledge our common heritage with those southern soldiers who were greatly admired by their foes, and who fought bravely for what they saw as the protection of their hearth and home.

This article originally appears on the Moderate Voice.

And it was all going so well for Democrats and liberals in the media.

Display a picture or vid clip of angry, contorted faces of the tea partiers, add the race card, accuse the “core” of the movement of being birthers, and generally play to the idea that this vast, grassroots movement is a small, insignificant bunch of sour grape Republicans who hate Obama.

Well, it worked for a while. But something funny happened on the way to smearing millions of ordinary Americans worried about the future; surveys of tea partiers show them to be almost as mainstream as a McDonald’s french fry:

The national breakdown of the Tea Party composition is 57 percent Republican, 28 percent Independent and 13 percent Democratic, according to three national polls by the Winston Group, a Republican-leaning firm that conducted the surveys on behalf of an education advocacy group. Two-thirds of the group call themselves conservative, 26 are moderate and 8 percent say they are liberal.

The Winston Group conducted three national telephone surveys of 1,000 registered voters between December and February. Of those polled, 17 percent – more than 500 people — said they were “part of the Tea Party movement.” …

Yeah, yeah OK. Let’s trash the results because the Winston Group is “Republican leaning.”

I suppose Gallup is in the GOP’s pocket too?

Tea Party supporters skew right politically; but demographically, they are generally representative of the public at large. That’s the finding of a USA Today/Gallup poll conducted March 26-28, in which 28% of U.S. adults call themselves supporters of the Tea Party movement.

Tea Party supporters are decidedly Republican and conservative in their leanings. Also, compared with average Americans, supporters are slightly more likely to be male and less likely to be lower-income.

In several other respects, however — their age, educational background, employment status, and race — Tea Partiers are quite representative of the public at large. (Emphasis mine)

Gallup actually gives better numbers for party affiliation than the GOP leaning Winston Group; 48% Republican and 43% independent with 8% self identified Democrats. And did Gallup really measure 32% of all Democrats in America supporting the tea partiers?

Ooops. There goes the narrative - mostly. With 28% of all Americans supporting the Tea Partiers and 26% opposed, you are bound to get a few kooks and crazies. You know the type; the one in ten thousand who hold up a sign comparing Obama to a witch doctor who somehow is portrayed as representative of protestors.

But I find it interesting that a group that is representative of the racial makeup of the US would be…racist. Can’t use the excuse that voters aren’t aware of the charges of racism made so casually, so nauseatingly by opponents. They’d have to be oblivious to the avalanche of media reports and opinion pieces that make the racist charge so cavalierly.

Beyond that, it is also not surprising that the majority would be conservative Republicans, although one might refer to most tea partiers as “nominal Republicans” in that I doubt whether there are more than a handful of GOP politicians that tea partiers are happy with.

I have been very critical of those in the tea party movement who seek to use anger and fear as a wedge to gain support for their cause. It is still my belief that reason wins a lot more converts than screaming, and fear mongering is self defeating - as seen by the failure to stop Obamacare. That vocal minority has done more damage to the tea party movement than most are willing to admit.

But the left is going to have to start coming to terms with this group based on reality, not their own, politically motivated smears. It is possible to argue against their positions without referring to them as racist, although I admit it’s a challenge to defend deficits of more than a trillion dollars as far as the eye can see. It is also possible to critique their arguments without trying to marginalize them as kooks. “Birtherism” has been so discredited that only a fringe now tries to keep the idea alive that Obama isn’t a natural born citizen. At any rate, is is a deliberate smear to posit the notion that the “core” of the tea party movement are birthers, as the president suggested in his Today Show interview.

Is the conservatism of the tea party movement farther right, in general, than the mainstream? We have little relevant data to make any kind of intelligent determination but my sense is that there is a distinct hard right flavor that, as Gallup might indicate, places the tea partiers on the edge of mainstream politics; not fringe by any means but some distance from the “center-right” that makes up the bulk of American voters. I would peg them as more ideological than much of the mainstream which skews their views in many respects. The fact that only 28% of all adults support them while 46% either have no opinion or don’t know shows there are a lot of adults in America who are suspicious of the tea party movement, as most Americans tend to be of excessively ideological people.

But even with those caveats, you cannot escape the notion that the narrative created by tea party opponents to smear them has been dealt a serious blow by these surveys. I’m sure on April 15th, when the tea partiers gather en masse once again, that we will get the same kind of coverage in the media that we have gotten previously; ignoring the tens of thousands of peaceful, reasonable, passionate demonstrators and highlight the kooks. At least, judging from the results of the surveys, the American people appear to be looking beyond that narrative and are focusing on the message of the movement; that we are spending too much and burdening future generations with obligations they will not be able to meet.

This article originally appears at Frum Forum.

In an excellent article in The New Republic, Sean Wilentz takes to task those who wish to resurrect the pernicious doctrine of “nullification” to thumb their nose at the federal government on health care reform.  Unfortunately, Wilentz conflates nullification with the idea of “states’ rights” in general:

Although not currently concerned with racial supremacy, the consequence of their doctrine would uphold an interpretation of the constitutional division of powers that would permit the majority of any state to reinstate racial segregation and inequality up to the point of enslavement, if it so chose.

Is opposition to health care reform at the state level leading to a resurrection of slavery? Really?

That much has been done in the last 100 years to undermine the 10th Amendment is not debatable. That the cause for this was considered just is equally true.

At the same time, in our zeal to improve the lives of American citizens, we have allowed the very concept of federalism to atrophy. Even debating the idea that the 10th Amendment can be redefined so that it can be made relevant in a 21st century industrialized democracy is seen as an exercise in futility.

Clearly, there are many functions of government that do not lend themselves to the concept of federalism. We can’t have 50 different air quality or water quality standards. Nor does the prospect of 50 OSHA’s or MSHA’s, or FDA’s, or any number of federal agencies responsible for our health and safety make any sense.

But is it possible to take a hard look at these agencies and discover a few responsibilities they currently enjoy that might be better performed by states? If it can be done without gutting them, why not try? Shouldn’t states have a lot more to say about how federal lands are used within their boundaries? Those lands are enormously valuable in many respects and yet the states have little say in the leasing and development schemes of the federal government. And it is long past time we take a very hard look at the Department of Education (with a $63 billion budget) and find a way to turn that department into an adjunct to local efforts at teaching our children rather than as a repository for bureaucrats to carve out their petty empires. With educational achievement at historic lows, it is evident that at least some of that money might be better given to states and local school districts to use as they see fit.

The concept of federalism today is a far cry from what the Founders envisioned. But that’s how it should be, and it’s perfectly in keeping with what those men imagined for the future. They may have written the Constitution for a small coastal republic of 7 million citizens, but were prescient enough to give their creation the revolutionary ability to change with a changing country.

Now that we are a continental nation of 300 million – as diverse and vibrant a society that has ever existed -it is time to re-examine and reinvigorate the founding notion that power shared and dispersed among many is the bulwark against which no force can threaten our liberties. Resurrecting the ghosts of the past to discredit this notion should be met with the contempt it deserves.

My latest at PJ Media is up. It examines President Obama’s new offshore drilling policy.

A sample:

In fact, what Obama giveth with one hand, he taketh away with another. Some leases already in motion have been canceled while potentially huge deposits of oil and natural gas are still off-limits, including the entire Pacific coastline of the United States from the Mexican border to Canada. In addition, in order to expand drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, the president must get the authorization of Congress. This would have been a snap when gas was $4 a gallon, but is much less a certainty today.

Other leases that had been approved in Alaska have also been canceled for further environmental study. Of course, the president didn’t even bother to mention the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge — sacred calving grounds of the porcupine caribou — which would yield as many barrels of oil as all the areas the president opened for drilling combined. And the slow motion approval process guarantees that I will be retired and getting to and from our little grocery store here in Streator, Illinois, riding a donkey before a drop of that East Coast oil makes it to market.

What is the point of this welcome but ultimately less-than-half measure to expand our domestic oil production? Note the word “drill” used in just about every headline in the media about this story. The president is sending a signal to the American people that he has heard their cries of “drill, baby drill” and has deigned to respond favorably. Citizens will think better of him for it, despite the fact that it will not increase domestic oil production until the president is long out of office and considered an elder statesmen. Perhaps he will have been elected president of the world by then, but if we’re still in Afghanistan I wouldn’t bet on it.

I should have written the article to reflect the fact that both parties are to blame for our current energy situation. The government has massively failed over the past 30 years to address the pressing matter of dependence on foreign oil as well as our refining capacity, and the future of energy in America.

I don’t care if its green energy or clean coal or natural gas and neither should anyone else. We need every erg of energy that can be squeezed out of our domestic supplies and a plan for the future that reflects the reality of Peak Oil and the necessity to find cleaner ways of powering our society.

We have gotten little leadership over the years - just grand plans and a lot of talk. Obama has made a good start with a solid plan for alternative energy sources, nuclear, and a clean coal. I wish he would have seriously looked at expanding this offshore drilling plan that doesn’t do near enough to exploit the resources of our own country.

But beyond that, Obama needs to lead. Let’s see how far he gets in pushing his energy agenda.

This post originally appears at The Moderate Voice

There is nothing new about one’s political opponent’s trying to define your philosophy. This is a part of politics as old as the republic, and the more stinking and fearsome you can define how your enemy thinks, the more hay you will make with the electorate.

It worked so well for movement conservatives that they have chased the designation “liberal” from public discourse, perhaps for all time, by demonizing, exaggerating, and ultimately condemning those who identified themselves thusly as less than patriotic, less than American.

And previous to that, liberals worked wonders with the word “conservative” as they branded anyone of that philosophical bent a frothing at the mouth anti-Communist, a danger to American liberties, an ignorant, unlearned rube distrustful of intellectuals, and a mossback who looked with suspicion on international entanglements.

So goes the unending war between the two great philosophies - the yin and yang of the soul of America, forever condemned to be at odds while the country would find it impossible to do without both.

The complementary forces at work that make both liberals and conservatives necessary for a healthy society far exceed the puny efforts to rip asunder the the soul of America where these philosophies reside. While we have seen in recent decades an excessive partisanship that seeks dominance and control over the mechanism of government, what has been happening beneath the surface hasn’t changed; the slow, grinding forces of history that shape the destiny of America in ways we can only understand when we remove ourselves from the present political skirmishes and see the contours revealed by looking over our shoulder at what we have become.

American history is not a straight line proposition. It is tempting for narrative historians to paint it that way, but by doing so, much is missed in the translation. And the reason that is basically true is because of how America changes over the years, and the nature of change itself.

Generally speaking, America is a nation created to embrace change. Our Constitution has codified this notion by including the radical idea that future circumstances may require that the founding document be amended. But at the same time - and this is the key - the founders made it damn near impossible to alter their masterpiece. The Constitutional amendment must be passed by a 2/3 vote Congress and then approved by 3/4 of the states. A tall order that, as evidenced by the fact that, excluding the Bill of Rights, we have altered the text of our founding document only 17 times in 221 years.

Clearly, the founders wanted a little built in prudence to govern the engine of change. There is nothing wrong with that, as any conservative could tell you. Prudence is perhaps the most important civic virtue to which a society and by extension, government can aspire. It allows for change without overturning society in a helter skelter effort to address the issue of the day, putting a break on passion and forcing the citizenry to deal with what needs to be done in a rational manner. Change should be managed and well considered with a sharp eye directed toward consequences both seen and perhaps unseen.

This has usually been the case in America. And when it hasn’t been so, the worst consequences have usually been outweighed by the gains we have made by marching into the future with little or no idea of where we were going. Only the fact that we were moving ahead seemed to matter.

You can pick your own examples from history but I like the radical change found in Jacksonian democracy overturning the established order and giving ordinary people power they were previously denied. The “Age of the Common Man” had begun and since then, politicians have pandered to that notion of the “ordinary American,” sometimes masking schemes that accomplished exactly the opposite by claiming solidarity with regular folk.

Thinking of what has been done by government in the name of the “Middle Class” is to contemplate the unforeseen consequences that Old Hickory unleashed. And yet, we certainly wouldn’t trade what we have with what the Jacksonians defeated; the idea that there was a landed aristocracy who should rule by birthright.

In a similar fashion, we accept the consequences of destroying slavery even with the monumentally awful consequences of war, bitterness, divisiveness, and the system of Jim Crow that replaced bondage because slavery was such a fundamental evil that the unforeseen consequences didn’t matter. It could be said that in the case of getting rid of involuntary servitude and flushing it forever from the Constitution, that we could well say to hell with prudence, the actions we’re taking are long past due.

There are other examples of great change leading to unforeseen and deleterious consequences. Think of the Great Depression and the revolution in government begun by FDR. Until that time, the only contact people had with Washington was basically through the post office, or the draft. FDR changed that forever by initiating a massive government intervention in the economy in order to “save capitalism” while ordinary people were helped via government assistance with jobs, food, and housing. By today’s standards, these changes were modest indeed. But whether you are a liberal or conservative, you have to agree that there were unintended consequences to these changes and that not all of them were good.

Think of World War II and the rise of the national security state, the baby boom, the creation of a consumer driven economy - all changes that have good and bad consequences for our society, most of them unforeseen. War seems to accelerate change whether we want it or not which is a consequence in and of itself. How different we would be if we had not been drawn into the conflict? Alternate history parlor games notwithstanding, it would be impossible to say.

This brings us to the present and our president’s charge that opponents of his health insurance reform plan failed to embrace it because of their fear of change. There is something to that idea, although I would strenuously argue that for many on the right, it was not a question of being fearful of change per se, only the imprudent, unforeseen, uncontemplated changes inherent in a 3000 page bill few had read, fewer still understood, and no one could imagine the worst of what this effort at comprehensive reform of 1/6 the economy would mean.

Russel Kirk may be talking about conservative philosophy here, but I think he speaks to prudent people everywhere:

Any public measure ought to be judged by its probable long-run consequences, not merely by temporary advantage or popularity. Liberals and radicals, the conservative says, are imprudent: for they dash at their objectives without giving much heed to the risk of new abuses worse than the evils they hope to sweep away. As John Randolph of Roanoke put it, Providence moves slowly, but the devil always hurries. Human society being complex, remedies cannot be simple if they are to be efficacious. The conservative declares that he acts only after sufficient reflection, having weighed the consequences. Sudden and slashing reforms are as perilous as sudden and slashing surgery.

It’s almost as if the old professor had health insurance reform in mind when he wrote those words more than 50 years ago. The difference here between “real conservatives” (Kirk) and “true conservatives” (Palin) is probably lost on the partisans from both sides. But there is a universality to what Kirk is saying that strays beyond ideology and speaks to something far more important; our innate common sense.

President Obama has made a passionate case for health insurance reform. Indeed, many on the left have declared America deficient because we refuse to follow the lead of our European betters and embrace government run health care. I don’t doubt for a minute their sincerity in believing what the Democrats hath wrought on health care reform isn’t good and necessary, although I would gently point out that our founders went about writing a Constitution that put as much distance as possible between us and their ancestors across the sea.

I do question their common sense and prudence in advancing legislation that so many don’t want, and so many have pointed out potential disastrous consequences. Given that all change brings with it these unforeseen happenstances, and that the bigger the change, the more potential for catastrophe, one can only conclude that this kind of massive reform of the entire health care system was unnecessary and imprudent.

Change for the sake of change is mindless idiocy. Change because we are unique, and altering our society to conform to someone else’s idea of what is proper is nonsensical. There must be purpose, logic, and reason to change or you allow passion to govern. And if that be the case, you not only lack prudence, but judgment as well.

The American people would have embraced a far less ambitious, less costly, more tailored reform effort. We could have insured the uninsured and made insurance available to those denied it because of a pre-existing condition. We could have placed the hand of regulation less heavily on insurance companies while forcing them to conform to better standards, with more consumer protection. We could have done all of this and then carefully weighed the consequences before proceeding further.

But we didn’t. And the unforeseen consequences of this imprudent alteration in our health care system may far outweigh any good done in the passing of it.

Am I talking about Democrats? Or am I quoting Johnny Rico’s battle cry from Starship Troopers?

As much as some Democrats and liberals remind me of cockroaches, the answer is a qualified “no.” I say that because if I was indeed crying out for the termination of liberal’s life functions, that would be wrong, although anyone who 1) took my threat seriously; or 2) tried to make the case that I was inciting violence would, under normal circumstances, be seen as something of a raving loon.

But that’s the state of political discourse today. Intent on stifling any post-Obamacare dissent, many of our friends on the left have discovered that over the top, exaggerated, hyperbolic rhetoric is not usually a good thing - except when they engage in such and target conservatives and Republicans. Then, all manner of free speech is allowed, even considered necessary, in order to stifle opposing viewpoints.

And connecting my “Kill them all!” cry to some yahoo throwing a brick through a Congressman’s office is, if possible, even loonier. Five seconds of extra thought to such a notion would tell you that not only would said yahoo probably be unable to read and therefore would miss my transgression against civility altogether, but the chances of him coming across my blog post in the first place are astronomically small.

Hence, I feel perfectly comfortable in crying out “Kill them all!” After all, who’s to say where I am directing my battle cry? Maybe I only want congressional liberals to expire? Perhaps I am only targeting black liberals with my eliminationist rhetoric? It’s even possible that I am only advocating that three toed, humpback, mustachioed, gay Democrats be given the deep six?

The only way to deal with restrictions on speech is to speak the supposedly offending words and offensive language in the loudest, longest, most exaggerated manner possible and keep doing it until those seeking to stifle your First Amendment rights are shown to be the tyrannical louts they truly are.

To wit:

It’s time to take off the kid gloves and start TARGETING these Democrats for SPECIAL TREATMENT. HANG THEM FROM THE YARDARM, I say! PUT THE CROSSHAIRS over their district and FIRE AWAY. Don’t be NIGGARDLY (couldn’t resist) in your criticisms. RACK THEM. You might even consider DRAWING AND QUARTERING them - metaphorically speaking, of course.

Why stop there? HANGING IS TOO GOOD FOR THEM! OFF WITH THEIR HEADS! BLEED THEM! MAKE THEM HOWL! STICK A FORK IN THEM! PUNCTURE their balloons. SLAP THEM SILLY! SLAP THEM UPSIDE THE HEAD. KNOCK THEM OVER THE HEAD WITH A TWO BY FOUR!

Getting hysterical over a figure of speech may be taking the idea of “eliminationist rhetoric” to its absolute, most frothingly idiotic limit. It isn’t a question of whether such language incites violence; it doesn’t. It isn’t a question of whether the user actually intends to hang someone from a yardarm or wishes to use the Medieval torture device, the Rack, to injure or kill a political opponent because the very definition of a “figure of speech” precludes such a possibility:

A Figure of Speech is where a word or words are used to create an effect, often where they do not have their original or literal meaning.

What we have is the old liberal trick of ignoring the author’s intended meaning of words and phrases in order to substitute their own, politically motivated interpretation of what is written. Hence, if I quote Johnny Rico by writing “Kill them all!”, I am not making fun of liberals, I am actually calling on those shadowy tea party folks to put a bullet through a Democratic Congressman’s head. It doesn’t matter that my intent was to make liberals look like idiots. It is that some liberal schmuck decided he could make political hay by pointing hysterically to my figurative use of the phrase and triumphantly accuse me of advocating the death of Democrats.

Goldstein has been tracking this phenomenon for years. He always explains it better than I:

As I’ve explained on countless occasions, however, language simply does not exist in the absence of intent. Intent — the intent to signify — is what turns signifiers into signs, marks into language (and so, potential communication). In an instance where we don’t know the intent of the author or utterer, it is our job as receivers of a communication to try to decode that intent. And that’s because the intent and the message are irrevocably tied together. Which is why when we aren’t interpreting by way of appeals to authorial intent, we aren’t “interpreting” at all. Rather, what we are doing is treating marks as mere signifiers, and then we are attaching to them our own signifieds — in essence, writing our own text. To then turn around and attribute the text we wrote to that author is not only wrongheaded, it is pernicious: after all, we are still privileging intent. It’s just that we have now privileged our own, while attributing that intent to the writer/utterer.

Intent is always present; whose intent gets privileged determines whether or what we’re doing is “interpreting” or “creative writing.”

When the left “privileges” its own intent, substituting their own interpretation of a word, or a phrase for what the author was trying to convey, it becomes impossible to communicate on any level whatsoever. How can there be discourse when both sides cannot agree on the meaning of language?

I hate to see the right attempting this nonsense - and not doing it very well. When Ed Schultz says on his show that if there is another Oklahoma City-like terrorist attack, that Glenn Beck and other righties should “blow their brains out,” no one with any respect for language believes that Schultz is advocating the death of talk show hosts. He is using a figure of speech to shock his audience (and garner ratings). He is not signaling some kook to kill Beck. He is not using language to incite violence against anybody. Those who interpret Schultz’s use of the cliche as anything other than the radio host doing his shtick are guilty of exactly the same kind of idiocy the left uses when critiquing, for example, Stephen Green’s call to “tar and feather” congressmen.

Political violence is unwanted in America. So is deliberate exaggeration of the threat of such. Ten recorded incidents against Democrats (and a couple against Republicans) do not a civil war make. The notion that tea partyers, bloggers, pundits, or anyone else on the right is advocating, inciting, or wishing for violence against Democrats is balmy.

That is, if everyone were truly interested in defining intent correctly, rather than reinterpreting speech in order to score political points and stifle the opposition.