More Things I Agree With

Rachel Maddow's point that it's not about incivility, it's about threatening to shoot people. I continue not to think that calling people socialists, or communists, or fascists, or whatever, is the problem that we all felt, perhaps wrongly in this instance, had finally manifested itself in an assassination on Saturday. The problem is the idea that it is legitimate to use violence against political enemies if you are losing the political battle, which has become eerily respectable on the conservative side of the isle since Obama became President. I really don't think that Joe Wilson's "you lie" remark is a Big Problem; it was a breach of decorum, but hey, it's about one-one-thousandth of the level of "disrespect" that we see in, I don't know, the House of Commons, where backbenchers routinely just shout things out. Things like, "Shame!" I don't think "you lie" would register in Parliament. And I don't think Britain has either a gun massacre problem or a political assassination problem.

As my dad, who spent time in England in his youth, is telling me, the idea of being civil toward your political opponents, the Reagan/Tip O'Neill post-6 o'clock thing, just isn't done in Britain. Labour and Tories just didn't do getting along with one another. Britain neither has a dysfunctional political system nor, as I said, a culture of assassination (N. Ireland aside). The reason for the former is that they don't have something absurd like the filibuster where the minority gets to rule if it wants to be an ass about it. The reason for the latter is that nobody much has guns.

So let's not bicker and argue about who insulted who. But yes, do let's bicker and argue about who killed who, or who threatened to.