Category Archives: Civility

I’ll TRY to be more colorful, if that’s what it takes

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Well, I think I know why Wesley and Phil haven’t had me back on “Pub Politics” for several weeks: I’m just not outrageous enough.

In this new environment, a blogger who wants attention is expected to claim to have done the nasty with a front-runner, and a state senator has to dredge through the darker recesses of nativist terminology to trash the ethnicity of a fellow legislator (who, coincidentally, happens to be that same front-runner).

I’m just a little too whitebread boring, I guess. I’ll try to work on that, if I can figure out the criteria for being the cynosure of all eyes in 2010: I mean, is it OK to claim to have done the horizontal mambo with ANY lawmaker, or do the standards require that it actually be Nikki Haley (because, you know, she just hasn’t been made to look like enough of a victim yet)? And are all ethnicities fair game? Can I say “wetback” or “mick;” is the “N” word going too far? Or does it have to be about Indians specifically? If so, it’s not fair, because Jake’s taken the best one. “Dot-head” seems thin stuff by comparison. And I hate to fall on the inaccurate, feeble slurs that Larry Koon supporters used against her in 2004, talking about worshipping cows and the like.

Or should I just go with my strength, and hope y’all will have me back because you think that after Jake Knotts’ performance, the show needs a little class to redeem it? Yeah, that’s the ticket.

What to say about Jake’s venture into what he terms “Saturday Night Live” humor? A number of things, I suppose:

  • First, thanks for holding yourself back there, Jake — seems I usually hear the full construction as “raghead sumbitches.” So you exercised some restraint. Either that, or you realized halfway through that she’s a chick, and can’t technically be a “sumbitch.”
  • That was really creative. Usually, the term is applied to A-rabs and the like. To expand its scope to include half-Kenyans and Sikhs displays a linguistic originality that is noteworthy.
  • Is that Andre Bauer camp a bunch of strategic geniuses or what? I hadn’t thought there was anything else that could make Nikki Haley look more like a martyr than what we had seen thus far, but these fellas just never say die; they can always go another mile.
  • Cindi Scoppe has got to be feeling really self-righteous today (if you can imagine that), being certain about how right she was to kick and scream and complain every inch of the way when I insisted that we break with precedent and endorse Jake last time around.
  • I might as well take down my video of Jake telling his life story (“How Jake became Jake…“), because it’s just going to seem way too dull after Wesley and them put up his latest performance on the Web.
  • Must I lower the standards of “The Brad Show,” if I ever have a second installment of it, in order to get viewers?

There’s plenty more that could be said, yet on another level, I sort of feel like enough has been said already.

Jake Knotts, 2008 file photo/Brad Warthen

I’m just not believing this stuff from Henry

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Shortly after I posted the thing about Henry’s “Vultures” ad, I came home, and in the mail was this flyer.

I’m just not believing Henry. He’s been such a sensible, grown-up attorney general after all those years of Charlie Condon’s pandering, and now this.

What office is he running for, anyway? Some office I’ve never heard of, some kind of super-sheriff to clean up Washington, and save it from Obama and the other godless commies?

“Our Founding Fathers Would Be Ashamed?” Yeah, I think maybe they would.

Let’s make the totally wild supposition, just for a moment, that the things he’s saying about Washington aren’t totally loopy. What on Earth does it have to do with the issues facing South Carolina?

Definitely not what we need in a governor.

I see that The State endorsed Vincent Sheheen Sunday, and made a good case. Presumably, that means the GOP endorsement will be this Sunday. The way things are going, I just don’t see how a credible case can be made for any of these folks. Not Henry, not in this mode. Not Nikki, the darling of BOTH the Tea Party and the Sanford crowd — and a sincere imitator of Sarah Palin. Certainly not Andre. That would seem to leave Gresham… who thinks we need an Arizona-style immigration law in SC.

I didn’t expect us to be here at this point. I figured by now, at least one of these folks would come across as acceptable, so that we could have a real choice in the fall. But most of them seem to be trying so HARD not to.

Have you seen that absurd McMaster ‘vulture’ ad?

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I hate to pick on Henry when he’s dealing with death threats — and I hope and pray that comes out OK for him — but I forgot to mention this after I saw it a couple of days back.

Have you SEEN that thoroughly outrageous new TV ad of his? After having put out a fairly reasonable piece recently (which contrasted nicely with some of the stuff his rivals were doing), he now comes out with yet another bid to out-extreme the other Republicans.

I would compare it to the infamous 1964 daisy petal/mushroom cloud ad, except it actually contains MORE radical distortion of reality. To quote from the text:

They’re circling…After bailouts and takeovers…The Vultures want more. Our healthcare… our hard earned money… our liberty. South Carolina’s sovereignty is under attack… by politicians preying on our freedoms. Henry McMaster is leading the fight for the conservative cause….

Say what? If I believed half this nonsense about the Dems in Washington (who are not, near as I can tell, running for SC governor, so why is Henry running against them?), I’d say it was time for SC to fire on Fort Sumter again.

But I don’t. And I don’t see how anyone could.

These are real people we’re talking about

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This morning, as I was headed to the office after breakfast, a guy on the elevator recognized me and introduced himself. It was a cousin of Will Folks.

Like Will’s Dad, whom I’ve also met, this cousin (whom I’m not going to name because I didn’t think to ask him if he’d mind, and it’s certainly not his fault that his cousin’s in the news) seems to be, and almost certainly is, a nice, reasonable guy who just lives his life and means no one any harm.

And chatting with him I was reminded again of how totally innocent people get splashed by these scandals that they have nothing to do with. Not that this guy complained about his cousin; he did not. But he spoke of how the family was having to make a special effort to keep their 97-year-old grandmother from seeing the news this week. And I sympathized.

I see this all the time, and to some extent, it keeps me grounded. When other people are gleefully chortling over the latest scandal, and presuming to assign the worst motives and actions to everyone involved and dismissing them as though they were abstractions — fictional characters invented for their entertainment or the furtherance of their cause — I remain conscious of the fact that they are real people. And they have connections to other real people who feel the heat from the spotlight.

We’ve all been guilty of such objectification of people in the news. For someone who’s spent a lifetime doing this, dark humor is a sort of defense mechanism against feeling too strongly the human tragedies that we deal in. But something has happened in recent years, with the ubiquity of sources of information, and with the removal of the last vestiges of respect for people’s personal lives: I’ve seen the average consumer of news, particularly the denizens of the blogosphere, become FAR more cynical than most news people.

One reason for that is that journalists actually know the newsmakers. Or writers do, anyway. I’ve noticed since early in my career that the biggest cynics in newsrooms are the editors who are tied to their desks. They see the people whose names appear in headlines as abstractions, as characters in stories, and nothing more. Reporters are more likely to have a complete, flesh-and-blood knowledge of those same people, and to care more about how what they write affects those people. This is at the root of the alienation between reporters and headline writers, for instance. Headline writers can get lazy and exaggerate; reporters have to deal with the fury of those who are mischaracterized.

Anyway, it’s considerations like this that make me absolutely hate stories such as this Haley/Folks mess, and wish I didn’t have to read or think about it (but since it bears on who will be our next governor, I can’t ignore it). I know Nikki. Yeah, I’ve been appalled at the change I’ve seen in her as she has been seduced by demagoguery. But I still hate to see her and her family in this fix. As for Will — well, he’s a somewhat less sympathetic character, no matter who’s telling the truth, and that’s because Will is one of those bloggers who show the most contempt for the human beings he writes about (like the ones I complain about so much). But Will is still a person, and there are other people who are certainly innocent in all this who are effected.

And while I don’t always succeed, I try to keep that in mind.

‘Ideas… having sex with each other:’ The collective, interactive nature of human progress

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There was a fascinating piece in The Wall Street Journal over the weekend, which I particularly enjoyed because of the way it cut across the way we tend to group ideas, particularly political and philosophical ideas, in popular dialogue.

In particular, I liked the way it applied economics to evolution to explain how human progress — innovation, wealth production, and other blessings of modernity — is a collective, interdependent process:

The answer lies in a new idea, borrowed from economics, known as collective intelligence: the notion that what determines the inventiveness and rate of cultural change of a population is the amount of interaction between individuals. Even as it explains very old patterns in prehistory, this idea holds out hope that the human race will prosper mightily in the years ahead—because ideas are having sex with each other as never before.

The piece started wondering why our ancestors, who could make tools for a couple of million years, didn’t really start to take off technologically or culturally until 45,000 years ago. The answer is that we are dependent on each other to move forward, and there have to be enough of us to reach critical mass if we’re really to take off.

The best part was right here:

But the sophistication of the modern world lies not in individual intelligence or imagination. It is a collective enterprise. Nobody—literally nobody—knows how to make the pencil on my desk (as the economist Leonard Read once pointed out), let alone the computer on which I am writing. The knowledge of how to design, mine, fell, extract, synthesize, combine, manufacture and market these things is fragmented among thousands, sometimes millions of heads. Once human progress started, it was no longer limited by the size of human brains. Intelligence became collective and cumulative.

In the modern world, innovation is a collective enterprise that relies on exchange. As Brian Arthur argues in his book “The Nature of Technology,” nearly all technologies are combinations of other technologies and new ideas come from swapping things and thoughts. (My favorite example is the camera pill—invented after a conversation between a gastroenterologist and a guided missile designer.) We tend to forget that trade and urbanization are the grand stimuli to invention, far more important than governments, money or individual genius. It is no coincidence that trade-obsessed cities—Tyre, Athens, Alexandria, Baghdad, Pisa, Amsterdam, London, Hong Kong, New York, Tokyo, San Francisco—are the places where invention and discovery happened. Think of them as well-endowed collective brains.

I like the way this celebrates human achievement — from science to culture to capitalism — while at the same time blowing apart the fantasy that so many (the Mark Sanfords of the world) harbor: That we function best as little individual islands left alone by society at large. We are all in this together, or we simply don’t progress.

I don’t know about you, but I find it far more elevating to think about ideas having sex than certain, um, people:

The process of cumulative innovation that has doubled life span, cut child mortality by three-quarters and multiplied per capita income ninefold—world-wide—in little more than a century is driven by ideas having sex. And things like the search engine, the mobile phone and container shipping just made ideas a whole lot more promiscuous still.

Reading all this caused me to have a depressing thought, however. I think these ways of looking at human progress may help explain why political ideas in this country seem so counterproductive, so mutually canceling, like intellectual dead-ends, with the so-called “liberals” and “conservatives” locked in perpetual battle with each having a slight majority for a time, but no progress ever being made (by anyone’s notion of “progress”)…

I think it’s because our political ideas no longer “have sex” with one another, borrowing memes from each other and changing and producing new, more vibrant and robust, hybrid ideas. Not only do the ideas of today’s so-called “liberals” and so-called “conservatives” not only don’t jump into the sack together, they don’t hold hands, or even look at each other across a crowded room. They don’t even listen to each other, much less join to be fruitful and multiply productive new ideas.

Our political system, centered around a legislative process that depends on deliberation — with real debate between people listening to each other in good faith — can’t function with all the dancers standing on opposite sides of the dance hall and refusing to speak to each other.

Maybe I should start marketing my UnParty as a political/intellectual fertility cult, and sponsor monthly idea orgies. Or something.

Just a thought.

Talk about a sleazy story taking on a life of its own…

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Here are links to some of the things being written today as a result of one SC blogger essentially saying of a female candidate, “Yeah, I tapped that.” (What, you know of a classier way to put it? Please share, because I’m at a loss as we all go swirling down the flushing toilet together in this sordid mess.):

Yes, the Wonkette. And ironically, the much-maligned (by me) Wonkette actually tries to responsibly answer the question, “Who should we trust?” (which of course should be “whom,” but why quibble?) and turns to my staid old newspaper to get the scoop on said blogger. Which is just weird. This disgusting mess is weird on so many levels…

By the way, Howard Kurtz shows he really doesn’t know South Carolina when he writes:

A year ago South Carolina wouldn’t have even been in the top half of my list of states with the craziest politics. But in the interim a lot has happened, and South Carolina is now in my top 10 and after this morning’s developments it’s making a strong bid for top 5.

I feel like he’s dissing us suggesting there might be four other states vying as hard as we are to be an insane asylum.

We are in a class by ourselves.

Graham on his meeting with Elena Kagan

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Sorry I haven’t posted yet today, and now I’m rushing off to lunch. But to give y’all something to chew on, I thought I’d share Lindsay Graham’s fairly positive report on his meeting yesterday with Elena Kagan:

Graham Meets with Supreme Court Nominee

WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) today made this statement after meeting with Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan.  Graham is a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“Ms. Kagan is not someone a Republican president would have chosen for a position on the Supreme Court.  However, the questions the country and Senate will be required to answer are whether she is qualified for the job, possesses the appropriate temperament, and whether her judicial philosophy is within the mainstream of American jurisprudence.  It is very important for a nominee to understand the difference between the role of a judge who interprets the law and an elected official who writes the law.

“We had a good meeting and discussed her qualifications and background in the law.  We also discussed legal issues related to the War on Terror and positions she has taken in her position as Solicitor General.  On many of these issues, we found common agreement.”

Judicial Experience:

“I do not believe that prior judicial experience is a prerequisite for sitting on the Court.  Some of the most distinguished justices in history, such as the former Chief Justice of the United States William Rehnquist, did not have prior experience.

“However, Ms. Kagan’s lack of a judicial record will make the hearings even more important.  Because she has no judicial decisions to review, her writings and opinions on issues regarding the law will be closely scrutinized.  These documents will provide the committee and country a window into her judicial philosophy, qualifications and temperament.

On Military Recruitment:

“Ms. Kagan explained to me that any position she took regarding military recruitment at Harvard should not be taken as a lack of respect for the U.S. Armed Forces.  She noted that her father was a World War II veteran.  I take her at her word that she respects the military and our men and women serving in uniform.”

#####

Apparently, he did NOT ask her for her views on softball. That Lindsey Graham is all business…

On the other hand, these are NOT the kinds of ads you want to see from one who would be governor

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Yesterday, I praised Henry McMaster for his latest campaign ad. Yeah, the praise was pretty damned faint, and I disagreed strongly with a great deal of what he was saying, but at least it was done with a tone and attitude that made you feel good about South Carolina — or at least got the impression that Henry felt good about South Carolina. And that’s too rare these days from our friends in the GOP.

Take, for instance, the pair of videos unveiled today by the Nikki Haley and Gresham Barrett campaigns.

We have Nikki labeling her rivals with the GOP cusswords “Bailouts,” “Stimulus spending” and “Career politicians” — about as neat a job of giving opponents short shrift as I’ve ever seen (as if those terms sum up the totality of who these men are) — before going on to say, in that hagiographic way she has, that SHE is the one true “conservative.” Whatever the hell that word means anymore. (It certainly doesn’t mean what it did when I was coming up.)

Then we have Gresham Barrett promising to be the meanest of all to illegal immigrants (the scoundrels!), and pass “a common-sense Arizona law.”

Sorry, folks, but neither of these glimpses of your values or your attitudes toward the world in general make me feel good about the idea of you being my governor. Not that you’re trying to please me, I realize; but that’s all I have to go by…

The gross immaturity of the blogosphere (with emphasis on “gross”)

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So this morning I noticed that a certain Rep. Mark Souder from Indiana was resigning over an affair. None of my business, of course. I’d never heard of the guy, and who represents Indiana in Congress is no concern of mine. Of course, I knew that the blogosphere would go nuts over this, because it supposedly had to do with an extramarital affair, and if this guy were a Republican the liberal blogs would have a field day drawing absurd conclusions that this said something about all Republicans, and if he were a Democrat, the opposite reaction would ensue.

But then, I was briefly tempted to post when it occurred to me that I could say something like, “Good for you, Rep. Souder — not for the affair, but for the resigning.” As in, something a certain SC politician should have done last year, thereby sparing us from hearing how he spends his weekends on the Florida taxpayers’ dime.

I couldn’t even bring myself to give Mr. Souder even THAT much of a backhanded compliment when I saw what a mealymouthed, whiny, blame-every-else explanation as to why he was resigning (pardon the all-caps; they’re from the original):

IN THE POISONOUS ENVIRONMENT OF WASHINGTON DC, ANY PERSONAL FAILING IS SEIZED UPON, OFTEN TWISTED, FOR POLITICAL GAIN. I AM RESIGNING RATHER THAN TO PUT MY FAMILY THROUGH THAT PAINFUL, DRAWN-OUT PROCESS.

Not that there wasn’t a certain justice in what he said. As to that…

A little later, I saw a link to a Wonkette post that in part said the following (please excuse the language):

Indiana Republican and eight-term congressman Mark Souder is resigning immediately because he had sexytime with a woman who was not married-in-Christ to him. Souder just defeated a teabagger in the GOP primary, but with less than 50% of the vote, and eh we’ve never heard of this guy — Indiana’s third congressional district, we should pay more attention to this hotspot! — so let’s get to the crazy all-caps SORRY JEEBUS I PUT MY WANG IN ANOTHER LADY’S LADYPARTS. Also, he’s a wingnut who campaigned on the bullshit “I will repeal Obamacare,” so let the Devil take him!The Devil take you, Mark Souder, for your Infidelity Against God! The Devil take you!

I usually don’t look at the Wonkette, or any other blogs that embody everything I don’t want this one to be. But I found myself wondering, as I usually do, is this stuff written by maladjusted 13-year-old boys? You know, an adolescent too worked up to stop and think about anything but his desire to impress his peers with his pimply disrespect for the whole world. The proper medium for this form of expression is the bathroom wall of a middle school.

Aside from being foul-mouthed, aside from taking idiotic, raving, snarling, snorting joy in the pain of other human beings, it is painfully unimaginative. Yeah, I know the history of the Wonkette, and how it interspersed commentary with sexual meanderings the founder moved on, so it has a standard to live down to. But it does it so badly, in such a thoroughly off-putting manner.

I would weep for the independent blogosphere, if I had cause to expect better of it. The good news is that the bar is so low that it’s easy to raise the standard, which I will continue to endeavor to do in my own little corner, with your help.

Yes, Henry, THAT’s the way you do it…

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… you play the guitar on the M-T-V…

Oops, got off track there. Wrong video.

What I meant to do was applaud Henry McMaster for a positive campaign ad, which helps remove the bad taste from some of his Obama-and-his-allies-are-dangerous-radicals approach of late.

I don’t agree with everything Henry’s saying in this ad, titled “It’s time to show the world what South Carolina can do”:

I have a plan to put South Carolina back on the Path to Prosperity. We’ll grow small business with lower taxes and less regulation. Encourage innovation and recruit high paying jobs in emerging industries. Expand our ports and open our economic door to the world. Improve education with choice, accountability and higher standards. It’s time to show the world what South Carolina can do!

… especially the idea that “choice” is the very first thing our schools need. Or that “lower taxes and less regulation,” while laudable in themselves, will substitute for building the workforce that businesses want and providing the basic societal infrastructure they need. But what I like here is that Henry’s talking about SC presenting a positive face to the world (for a change), instead of making us look like the wacky extremists that too many think we are already.

He’s talking about what he’s FOR, rather than trying to resonate with negative people about what they’re against.

Good one, Henry!

Mild-mannered demagoguery in the echo chamber

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Just now I got an automated phone call on my land line inviting me to take part in a telephone “town hall meeting” with Jim DeMint. So I listened in.

And first, I want to say that I appreciate that Jim DeMint is mild-mannered. None of that shouting, in-your-face demagoguery for him.

But that said, I have to say that after awhile, hearing some fairly extreme ideas espoused mildly and politely starts to creep me out.

Basically, the way this thing worked was that ordinary, regular, plain, normal, average Americans in the 2nd District asked the senator question after question in a manner that was rather like T-ball. Nobody was trying to throw it past him, and he kept saying “good question” to little sermonettes from folks who are worried about that Barack Obama guy giving away “our freedoms,” on issue after issue. Whether we’re talking global warming or trade or monetary policy to crime to health care, that’s what it always boiled down to: Thank goodness we have you, senator, to stand up for our freedoms. No problem, folks, glad to do it, and be sure to sign up for my “Freedom Alert” reports…

When somebody calls in, truly worried about crime — her house has been broken into twice, she said — and says “Is it possible that they’ll be able to take away our constitutional right to bear arms?,” it seems to me that the right thing to do would be say, “Of course, not — no one is trying to do that to you.” But not Jim. In his own mild, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-his-mouth way, he makes sure he gives the impression that the only reason ATF goons aren’t about to batter down your door and take your guns from your cold, dead fingers is because he’s there stopping ’em: “I’m doing all I can,” he promises, “to make sure we don’t lose our constitutional rights.”

So why am I not reassured?

Yes, I could have hit a button and tried to butt in with a “Hey, wait a minute” sort of question, but all those years of not upstaging regular folks — of not wanting to become the story — stopped me.

One guy, though, did — right at the end — ask Jim what in the world would be wrong with ordinary working Americans having the same kind of health coverage as Congress (this was the only question I heard on the subject that wasn’t about that Obama wanting to take away our Medicare and turn it over to the gummint). Jim assured him that HE wanted ordinary Americans to have good health care, which was why he provided insurance when he was an employer in the private sector, and that he thought members of Congress should be forced to sign up for whatever gummint plan it cooked up, etc., etc. — everything, of course, except to say that yes, members of Congress are in a government health care system, and it works just great for them.

Far more typical was Hazel, who wanted to know why she had worked to pay into Medicare for over 40 years, and now that Obama “wants to take it away from us.”

And of course, Jim didn’t say, “You like Medicare? So what’s wrong with having it for everybody?” That would apparently defeat his purposes.

Anyway, when it was over Jim went away feeling all that much better about his brave stances against health care reform and cap and trade and so forth.

Maybe I should have said something. You think I should have said something? I should have said something…

Being “liberal” isn’t Daniel Schorr’s main problem

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One of the really irritating things about Twitter is that it is a tease. Time after time, I follow links to things that I hope will be interesting and informative, only to find that they don’t really tell me much more than the original Tweet.

For instance, a tweet from Romenesko said…

romenesko

NPR CEO Vivian Schiller is asked in a chat: “Why do you keep Daniel Schorr around?” (She admits he’s liberal, but…) http://is.gd/4RZz5

This grabbed my attention because I find myself wondering why NPR keeps Daniel Schorr around, too. But the link to the item at Romenesko in turn linked to a typo-ridden transcript of an interview, and here was the entire discussion of Schorr:

Derwood, Md.: Why do you keep Dan Schorr around? His analysis is reliably faulty, liberally-biased, and mean-spirited (yeah, I guess I’d feel the same way after what Nixon did to me). But still — he really knocks down any credibility you have of being ‘unbiased’, especially since he is a part of the news wing, not entertainment.

Vivian Schiller:

Dan Schor is a liberal commentator. I will not deny that is true. So what do we do about that? We balance his views with those of conservative guest commentators who frequently appear on our airwaves. Granted, they are not staff and you may think that makes a difference. But their voices are heard on our air, and I’m comfortable with that. We’re not planning to make 93- year old Dan Schor a freelancer at this point.

Not very satisfying. So I’ll add two cents worth of my own…

Excuse me for being disrespectful to the elderly, but I cannot abide listening to Daniel Schorr, even for a few seconds. And it’s not because he’s “liberal.” It’s because he’s so unpleasantly arrogant. It drips from every word he says.

Yeah, I get it, Dan: You were on Nixon’s enemies list. You were one of Murrow’s boys. You’ve been around, and had a storied career. Got it. It doesn’t make you God Almighty, and yet that’s what he sounds like he thinks he is with every pronouncement. And it’s not so much any particular thing he says; it’s the way he says it.

Bill Moyers is liberal, but he can be pleasant. David Broder has been around forever, but he acts like a normal, humble human being. Daniel Schorr is just obnoxious to listen to. It occurs to me, when I hear him, that any journalist about to express an opinion (or, allegedly, report) on radio or television would do well to tell himself, just before going on, “Don’t sound like Daniel Schorr.”

And yes, I admit this is probably an irrational prejudice on my part. Something about the frequency of his voice or something sets me off. He comes on the air, and it’s like fingernails on a chalkboard; I have to change the station away from NPR. Am I alone in this?

Mullins grabs some attention, but fails on civility

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You may recall that I haven’t been too impressed with Mullins McLeod. I’ve generally dismissed his campaign as being… what’s the word… trite, I suppose. His campaign releases have sort of struck a generic populist pose, trying to project him as a regular guy who’s tired, just as you good people out there are, of all them blamed politicians and their shenanigans.

That pose is tiresome enough when done well, but as I said, his populist pronouncements have been so vanilla, as that genre goes, so as to be easily forgettable five minutes later. As I said back here, Mullins just hasn’t been able to get a hit in his few at-bats.

Well, he made a concerted effort to get on base yesterday, when he told Gresham Barrett to “shove it” on the Gitmo prisoners issue. Well, Gresham certainly deserved to have someone call him on his really ugly NIMBY ploy for attention, but while it might be cool for, say, a Dick Harpootlian to say something like that (except that Dick would be more imaginative, and he’d say it in Dwight’s behalf, not Mullins’), that’s not the kind of language we need from one who would be governor.

So basically, Mullins has managed briefly to get our attention by passing first and running the basepaths, but he’s immediately alienated us by coming into seconds with sharpened spikes high, a la Ty Cobb. In other words, the first time he gets our attention, he fails the civility test.

Hey, if we wanted a guy who talks like this as governor, we could turn to Joe Wilson.

Awaiting moderation (in more ways than one)

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Just FYI, to give you a glimpse behind the scenes…

I agree with y’all that the blog has become a more lively and enjoyable forum since I started banning bad actors — or rather, since I started requiring that comments display a constructive engagement before I let them be published.

Since some of y’all are of a political persuasion that makes you want to know what’s done on your behalf — by the CIA, by Blackwater, or by me — I thought I’d give you an update on what you are NOT seeing on the blog.

Basically, I’ve banned Lee Muller, and “Mike Toreno” and “BillC.” But you probably knew that. Something you may not know is that all three have tried commenting under different names — Lee under his old pseudonym “SCNative,” “Mike” as “CarlsBoss,” and BillC as just “Bill.” I’ve shared with you some of the things Lee had to say as “SCNative,” back on this post.

Two other individuals have failed to make the cut: Someone called “enemy within” (who may actually be a spam program; I’m not sure), and just today, our old friend “Workin’ Tommy C.”

“Workin’ Tommy” tried to comment on this post, basically as an advocate for Angry White Maledom (excerpt: “Angry white men created the government as defined in the U.S. Constitution. Outraged men of principle MADE this country…”). And as a representative of that point of view, I almost approved him … but, remembering some of his behavior back on the old blog, decided to think about it. Then “Tommy” confirmed me in my caution by posting this follow-up:

My earlier comment is still awaiting moderation.

Can’t handle the truth, Warthen?

Anyway, that’s what’s happening beneath the surface.

Yours in civil discourse,

Brad

Hey, where are all my yes-men?

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There were those who said that if I went back to moderating comments, you’d only find those who agree with me.

That was, of course, patently ridiculous — nothing in my background would suggest that (I mean, have you EVER read the letters to the editor?) — but people said it as a way of trying to get me to back off. It’s the sort of wild, slashing insult that’s supposed to rock me on my heels and let the bad actors stay.

Not even I had expected the degree to which folks who used to defend me against the screamers now take me to task. Have you noticed it? I mean, I can’t seem to say anything right. Look back through the threads, and see if I’m right.

But the difference is, it’s civil. And that encourages people to step out and disagree, knowing they won’t be subjected to unwarranted hostility, that their disagreement will be respected — even when they disagree with me and are, therefore, wrong. (People even give me the room to kid around, but of course I won’t abuse the opportunity.)

It’s lively, and it’s constructive. In other words, it’s working. Have you noticed?

Goys will be goys

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There is a saying that negroes like watermelon because…

No, that doesn’t quite capture it, does it? By comparison, it’s pretty innocuous. After all, you could end the sentence, “everyone does.” What’s the harm in liking watermelon? Rather insensitive, not the sort of thing you’d go around saying if you had half a brain and cared anything about other people’s feelings, but it’s not in the same league with Edwin O. Merwin Jr. and James S. Ulmer Jr. invoking the myth of the rich, avaricious Jew, a stereotype that helped feed the resentments that led to the Holocaust.

No, for an analogy, you’d have to reach to something that actually resulted in the murders of black people, something like, “There is a saying that black men lust after white women because…”

Where did the GOP find these guys? In case you missed it, these two geniuses Merwin and Ulmer — Republican Party chairmen in Bamberg and Orangeburg counties, respectively — wrote the following in an opinion piece published in The (Orangeburg) Times and Democrat:

There is a saying that the Jews who are wealthy got that way not by watching dollars, but instead by taking care of the pennies and the dollars taking care of themselves. By not using earmarks to fund projects for South Carolina and instead using actual bills, DeMint is watching our nation’s pennies and trying to preserve our country’s wealth and our economy’s viability to give all an opportunity to succeed.

I find myself wondering, What saying? Who says it?

These guys actually could make a guy sympathetic toward earmarks, which one assumes was not their aim.

Karen Floyd says they’ve apologized, and that’s that. What do y’all think?

Of COURSE most of Wilson’s and Miller’s money is from outside SC. Those donors don’t know them.

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I see that most of the money that has unfortunately flowed into the coffers of Joe Wilson and Rob Miller came from out-of-state:

Over the next 21 days, through the Sept. 30 end of this year’s third quarter, Wilson and Miller combined to raise $4.34 million – more than Democratic Rep. John Spratt and GOP challenger Ralph Norman collected over two years for their 2000 election in what had been the state’s richest U.S. House race ever.

No less remarkably, the vast majority of the largest donors to Wilson or Miller live outside South Carolina – 77 percent of Wilson’s new backers, and 86 percent of Miller’s recent supporters…

Nothing remarkable about it. It stands to reason — out-of-state donors don’t know these guys.

A more discriminating, local giver would probably wait and give to a candidate who could provide better representation to the 2nd District (ahem!). These ideologues from elsewhere couldn’t care less about the 2nd District or any other part of South Carolina; they’re just doing their bit to keep the partisan spin cycle spinning.

A donor who’s giving money to Joe Wilson because he yelled “You lie!” probably wouldn’t give it if he knew that normally, Joe is not a natural vessel for delivering such hostility. He’s a fairly mild-mannered guy who lost control for a moment, and initially did what came naturally and apologized, before getting swept up in something ugly.

A donor who wishes to express outrage over what Wilson does probably wouldn’t give to Rob Miller if he knew what a weak candidate he was. (My prediction: If no other candidates get into this — and unfortunately, with them sitting on all this money now, probably no one will — Miller will probably lose to Wilson by almost the same margin by which he’s trailing him in fund-raising. $2.7 million to $1.69 million — well, maybe the Democrat would do a little better than just under 40 percent, but he still will lose substantially.)

OK, part of it is your track record, not just what you say today

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Now that I’ve actually tried to implement the new comments policy for nearly a full day, I’m realizing something more fully than I did before. Yesterday, I wrote of my dilemma:

I see, for instance, that WordPress provides the option of “Comment author must have a previously approved comment,” which sounds nice, but what good is it really? I prefer to judge a comment by its own merits, not by who posted it. Lee, for instance (and Lee really resents being picked on, and he’ll probably see this as being picked on, but let’s face it; his name is the one my readers most frequently bring up as an irritant), sometimes posts perfectly fine comments that add to the conversation. I’m not saying it happens every day, but it happens. So, going by my own preferred standards, I would approve that one good comment — and under the “Comment author must have a previously approved comment,” he would then have carte blanche to return to his habitual ways.

See, at that point I was undecided: Under this new approach, should I reward Lee, or “Mike Toreno” or “BillC,” by posting their comments when they behave themselves? Or should I just ban them for their past sins?

When I first posted the new rules, I was leaning toward the former. But I find I’m implementing the latter.

That’s because my goal is to make this a more comfortable place for people who are not shouters or trolls or flamers or whatever to air their thoughts without being dismissed or insulted, which has kept a LOT of good people away. The three I mention above — Lee and “Toreno” and “BillC” — sometimes seem like the only readers of my blog, because of the way they dominate conversations. Especially Lee, who posts early (generally first) and often (alarmingly often). After awhile, they have more impact on the general tone and feel of the blog than I do. Which will sort of make a guy wonder why he’s bothering.

So — even though they may be trying to post some comments that provoke thought without insulting anyone, so as not to be barred, I’m reluctant to approve anything by those three. And so I haven’t. If I let them back in now, I know that gradually they’ll push a little more, and a little more, and my attention will wander, and pretty soon we’re back where we were. I’ve been here before with repeat offenders, and I know the trajectory that these things follow.

If one is of a legalistic mind, this will seem unfair. After all, the judge and jury are only supposed to consider whether the accused committed THIS crime, rather than convict him on the basis of his past offense (right? you lawyers, feel free to jump in at this point).

But folks, I am not obliged to approve anybody’s comment, ever. I don’t even have to allow comments. I do it because I want to. And if somebody has created an ugly disturbance in my living room too many times, I’m not going to invite that person any more, lest my more desirable guests stop coming (and who would blame them).

So I haven’t approved anything by the three I mentioned above, even though they have tried several times. Not for the foreseeable future. They will no doubt find this frustrating. Well, they can go start their own blogs, and dedicate them to trashing this one, if they are so inclined. And if they can get anybody to read them, then more power to them. I’m not going to let them feed off of, and undermine, my ability to draw an audience any longer. They are personae non grata.

(And yes, I know that they can always come back under a new pseudonym — actually, I suspect one of the three of having done so quite a few times before — but that’s why I’m also monitoring the content of comments, rather than simply barring those names.)

Now, for the rest of you, you’re being judged by each comment. Yeah, some others among you aside from the banned three have contributed to ugliness on this blog. So, many of you will accuse, have I. But you’ve also contributed positively, and by approving some of your comments and not others, I hope to get all of us into the habit of listening to our better angels, and reflecting that in our writing.

If it seems like I’m making up the rules as I go along, then you’re very astute. But I’m doing the best I can. If you don’t like it, again: Go to another blog, or start your own. But if you want to be part of building a better public forum, welcome.

The New Blog Order, Mark IV

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OK, I really don’t know how many “New Blog Orders” there have been; I just thought “Mark IV” sounded good.

Anyway, here’s the new deal, for now: Comments won’t appear unless I approve them. (And yes, we’ve been here before, in a previous regime change. The video above of me explaining this very same approach was shot during a family gathering at my house in July 2007. See how unhappy I was with having to take this approach? That’s the way I look now, only without the grubby beginning of a beard. Sort of amazing, isn’t it, that as fed up as I was then, I’m still trying? I’m nothing if not persistent.)

I’m going to do that for a few days at least, and then I hope to go to something less stringent, not that there are a lot of options. I see, for instance, that WordPress provides the option of “Comment author must have a previously approved comment,” which sounds nice, but what good is it really? I prefer to judge a comment by its own merits, not by who posted it. Lee, for instance (and Lee really resents being picked on, and he’ll probably see this as being picked on, but let’s face it; his name is the one my readers most frequently bring up as an irritant), sometimes posts perfectly fine comments that add to the conversation. I’m not saying it happens every day, but it happens. So, going by my own preferred standards, I would approve that one good comment — and under the “Comment author must have a previously approved comment,” he would then have carte blanche to return to his habitual ways.

Ultimately, the place where I think I’ll end up is that I’ll open the gates back up, but I’ll make a point of checking comments several times a day, and just delete anything that doesn’t contribute to this being a place that encourages thoughtful people who want to engage in good-faith dialogue.

And I know those people are out there. Just this morning, I was meeting with a prominent local attorney — a public-spirited guy who is a great public speaker and has a lot to say — mentioned to me that there was NO WAY he was going to spend any of his life wrestling in the mud with a bunch of trolls on a blog. And the bad thing about that is, he is just the kind of person I wish would join in with our dialogues here — I want lots of people like him, from across the political spectrum (and those of you on the left or right who think there are no thoughtful people with something worthwhile to say on the opposite end of the spectrum; well, you’re part of the problem).

So in this latest effort to foster the kind of place that he and other like him would consider worthy of his time, I’m going with a standard that goes beyond the mere absence of incivility. I’m going to look for posts that actually contribute something. I’m going for positive attributes, rather than just the absence of negative ones. Because serious people (or for that matter, people who like to have a little fun, just not at other people’s expense) deserve a blog that answers that description.

At this point, some of you are furiously writing to me to say, “You just want comments that agree with you!” which is ridiculous. That’s a ploy to get me to back down on enforcing standards, and post something that calls me and people who agree with me names just to prove how “fair” I am. Well, you know what? I’m not falling for that. I’ve heard it too many thousands of times from people who just can’t be bothered to disagree in a civilized manner.

I know that I’ve always given precedence to people who disagree with me. And anyone who’s followed my career and is not seriously challenged in the reading comprehension department knows that about me. But from now on, you’re going to disagree in a way that it doesn’t run off well-behaved people. You’re going to disagree in a way that makes people think, “Maybe he’s got a point” instead of “What a jerk!” I realize this is going to be a challenge for some, but I hope the rest of you will appreciate it.

And if you don’t, or if you just can’t bring yourself to meet the new standard, you are completely free to go start your own blog. This one’s mine, and I’m not going to waste time with it unless I think it’s getting better, and providing a worthwhile forum.

Another stab at civility: “Unapproving” comments

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When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one blogger to dissolve the permissive bands which have connected him with trolls and to assume among the powers of the Web, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitles him, a decent respect to the opinions of the Blogosphere requires that he should declare the causes which impel him to the separation.

I hold these truths to be self-evident, that all discourse is not equally valid, nor constructive, nor is anyone endowed by his Creator with any unalienable Right to destroy all Harmony and chance for Civil Discourse in a forum provided by the Labour of Another. All men are equally free, however, to start their Own Blogs, where they will be fully entitled to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

— from my old blog, July 4, 2007

Folks, after getting a number of complaints from some of you — mostly in sidebars, via e-mail and other means — about the increasing incivility on the blog, I went in and “unapproved” a bunch of comments from over the weekend.

Removing all the ad hominem attacks, irrelevant rants and pointless catchphrase-shouting is a lot tougher than it may sound. You end up throwing out a lot of stuff from people with the best intentions, but whose comments make zero sense without the offensive comments to which they are responding. So just about everybody has lost at least one comment. Among those I’ve censored, if only briefly, are Lee Muller, “Libb,” “Mike Toreno,” bud, Randy E, kbfenner, BillC, and Burl Burlingame.

This of course is not to say that I consider all “offenders” to be the same. Lee Muller seems increasingly incapable of making a point without peremptorily declaring the illegitimacy of anyone who disagrees. The pseudonymous Mike Toreno and BillC have some really serious hostility issues. On the opposite end of the spectrum, people like Kathryn Fenner labor, often in vain, to elevate the tone.

I’m not sure what to do about this going forward. I’m as sick of the nastiness as Kathryn and others who have simply given up on this forum. So I find myself considering a number of possibilities:

  • Requiring active approval from me before comments will post. I’ve done that before, on the old blog, and I really hated it. It killed spontaneity. I want y’all to be able to converse in real time, and I simply can’t spend all day making that happen.
  • Banning some commenters from the blog permanently. I’ve done it before, just not for awhile. Some of the greatest offenders are people I’ve banned before, then allowed to come back — perhaps because of misplaced optimism on my part. So I guess it’s time to do it again.
  • Requiring a higher level of permission from me, as the moderator, before a commenter can post comments at will. (I’m not even sure this is technically possible, but I intend to look into it.)
  • Simply doing what I just did — going through every couple of days and weeding out the worst offenses, with the hope that folks will start to get the idea what will pass muster and what won’t.
  • Dropping the blog altogether. Not something I want to do, but it is on the table.

That last option arises from simple weariness with this problem, and the acknowledgment that I can’t (or at least, don’t want to) spend my days policing grownups to get them to act like grownups.

Other (good faith) suggestions are welcome.

As you know, I’ve wrestled with this problem from the beginning. And at various times, the tone has gotten better for awhile. But we’ve done some backsliding lately. I’m going to try, up to a point, to fix it.