It burst into
flames! It burst into flames, and it's falling, it's crashing!
Watch it! Watch it, folks! Get out of the way! Get out of the
way! Get this, Charlie! Get this, Charlie! It's fire -- and
it's crashing! It's crashing terrible! Oh, my, get out of the
way, please! It's burning and bursting into flames, and the --
and it's falling on the mooring-mast. And all the folks agree
that this is terrible, this is the, one of the worst
catastrophes in the world. Ohhhhh! It's -- it's -- it's the
flames, [indecipherable, 'enty' syllable]
oh, four- or five-hundred feet into the sky and it ... it's
a terrific crash, ladies and gentlemen. It's smoke, and it's
flames now ... and the frame is crashing to the ground, not
quite to the mooring-mast. Oh, the humanity ...
-- Radio announcer Herbert Morrison in a live broadcast
as the zeppelin Hindenburg crashed and burned on May 6,
1937
To read
Mark McKinnon over at the Daily Beast
you would think he's a latter day Herbert Morrison and this
year's Hindenburg is a bag of wind called
"civility."
Ohhhhhhhhh the civility weeps McKinnon.
Can one weep if one is a crocodile? Crocodile tears,
recall, are said to have been shed by these reptiles -- while
busy eating their victims. In a word, the phrase means
hypocrite.
Mr. McKinnon, a former aide to both George W. Bush and John
McCain, is described by his former bosses as a man of
"creativity" (Bush) and President McCain cites him as "almost a
genius." Oops. President McCain is still Senator McCain so
perhaps that's why the "almost" is in there.
Among Mr. McKinnon's activities these days (he announced in
2008 he wouldn't campaign against Obama) is as a columnist over
at the left-leaning Daily Beast. From there
he has issued his latest mournings for civility. His target this
time is Mark Levin, the author of Liberty and Tyranny: A
Conservative Manifesto and, famously these
days, one of the top talk radio hosts in America.
Mr. McKinnon posits the usual yada-yada-yada, his schtick
always being some version of the idea that conservative X is a
"hate-monger." For this column he zeros in on Levin, who, stands
accused by McKinnon of lacking civility.
The McKinnon column on Levin seems to have been essentially
lifted with filler from the "Controversies and Criticism" section
of Wikipedia. A heading that comes with a warning from Wikipedia
itself that "undue weight" has been given to what, when one
reads, are obviously contributions from people who clearly -- yes
-- hate Mark Levin. No word from McKinnon on why its OK to hate
Levin, because -- ooops! -- he hates Levin himself.
The problem here is that McKinnon has swallowed whole the
notion trailed about for decades by the left that it's OK to let
people get away wholesale with everything from abject racism to
character assassination to outright lying -- if they're just
nice about it! In other words, perhaps
fitting for a PR guy, McKinnon's world is the ultimate triumph of
form over substance.
In McKinnon's world, Sonia Sotomayor can use race as a
reason to make decisions from the federal bench -- but joking
about her weight (as Levin is said to have done by an anti-Levin
Wikipedia contributor) is off limits. The National Organization
for Women is defended by McKinnon against another alleged Levin
joke -- but no word as to McKinnon's opinion on the civility of
NOW falling silent as Bill Clinton's female targets came forward
back in the nineties with charges ranging from sexual assault
(Kathleen Willey) or, even more graphically, a rape charge from
one-time Clinton supporter Juanita Broaddrick.
Which re-enforces the image that for all his so-called
"creativity" and "genius " McKinnon simply is tone deaf or
willfully ignorant of substance. A typical Mark Levin show is
routinely spent illustrating issues from economics to history to
constitutional law to politics and philosophy. One can only
conclude that these issues either don't interest McKinnon or he
simply would rather do PR.
But for whatever reason, it is way past time that this
McKinnon argument be dispatched. If you preach a doctrine that
judges should use race to make rulings from the federal bench
(Sotomayor) -- but do it with sweet civility, you are still a
racist. (Something Martin Luther King himself once noted.) If you
use ugly appeals to class warfare (a favorite of another McKinnon
client, the late Texas Governor Ann Richards) -- but are as sweet
as apple pie while you ruthlessly divide and hurt people, egging
them on to hate -- this is immorality, not civility,
Mark McKinnon, it seems, has a serious problem when it
comes to civility and immorality that Mark Levin has never
had.
Understanding when one is used to mask the other.
