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The arc of political discourse — 7 Comments

  1. Here’s another — more recent — example of much the same thing, courtesy of Jason Beale:

    Imagine if Trump called @IlhanMN a traitor and an agent of a foreign power. And then everyone in the media and the Republican party repeated and reinforced the allegation every day and night for two years. And the former CIA, FBI, and NSA directors said, “Yep, she’s a traitor.”

    https://mobile.twitter.com/jabeale/status/1152059436892151808

  2. America has been a raucous and sometimes violent country when it comes to politics. The level of TDS obsessive craziness and the violence it promotes reminds me of the turbulence of late 60s and early 70s. I expect there will bombings in the run up to the 2020 elections. We have told our daughter and her family in Chicago that we won’t be visiting them in the second half of next year. We tried to convince them to get out of Chicago and find jobs in a better environment, but she and her husband like their jobs and their northside neighborhood. We enjoy their neighborhood when we visit, but are always happy to get home to small town Iowa.

  3. For some nasty rhetoric, consider what Democrat Vice Presidential candidate Henry Wallace said during the 1940 campaign. Nixon wasn’t the first attack dog VP. From page 77 of The New Dealers’ War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the War Within World War II:

    By approving these moves, Willkie seemingly conceded the race. FDR felt no compunction about ignoring the GOP candidate’s repeated demands for a debate. That left most of the heavy lifting to Henry Wallace, and he revealed an unsettling tendency to say extreme things. “The Republican candidate is not an appeaser and not a friend of Hitler,” Wallace declared at one point. “I’ll say too that every Republican is not an appeaser. But you can be sure that every Nazi, every Hitlerite, and every appeaser is a Republican.” 45

    If you consider “appeasers” to be those who voted against the Draft, Henry Wallace’s claim that “every appeaser is a Republican” was patently false, as about a quarter of the Democrats in the Selective Service vote, voted against it.Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 passed by one vote.

    203–202, with 182 Democrats and 21 Republicans in favor, 65 Democrats, 133 Republicans, and four others against. “House Vote on Draft Bill”, The New York Times, August 13, 1941

    In addition, the Commies were very much anti-war in 1940. Dalton Trumbo and Pete Seeger devoted considerable creative energies in creating anti-war works, only to abandon pacifism when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union on June 22,1941.

    While Henry Wallace became an anti-Communist during the Korean War, he had been at best a Commie dupe until then.

  4. As people lose their heads in election insanity fever once again, I get to keep mine.

  5. Not to suggest that Democrats are not whacked out loonies with their heads so far up their asses that it’s coming back out the top….

    But this kind of thing goes waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back:

    “Murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will openly be taught and practiced, the soil will be soaked with blood, and the nation black with crimes,” said an 1800 Connetticut ‘Courant’ editorial opposing the election of Thomas Jefferson as president. Now the ‘Hartford Courant’, the paper marked the 250th anniversary of Jefferson’s birth with an apology. Said the ‘Courant’: “It’s never too late to admit a mistake.”

    Odds are, they’ve retracted the apology, these days….

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