Very possibly he’s most upset about the coarsening of social and public dialectics. And so he’s found a way to tie a coarsening to what took place at a John McCain rally; transference, if you will. If he had sermonized upon just that, the coarsening, he’d have made a far better point. Instead, he comes across as well, terrified, and pointing his finger at the right person to “do something”; when instead, he should be using his shaming stick at the very people who’ve wrought American crises - the Democrats. It’s unfortunate; but certainly he’s not at all exempt in acting upon this so very human foil and folly.
Rush actually does a very good job of this when he plays the exact same phrases and ideas coming from multiple talking heads.
date correction in tagline and thanks for the good wishes
That is a whole other discussion, I think. Is today's dialogue indeed more coarse that ever? To one extent it is it is. The anti-war movements of the 60's began a decline.
"Hey! Hey! LBJ!
How many kids did you kill today?"
While MLK's rhetoric in the civil right movement was lofty and ennobling, we also heard H. Rap Brown
"I say violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie."
Before this, first in radio and then in television, there was a lid kept on what was permitted over the public airwaves. Of course, there was also a consensus about thet; due in part, I believe to the nation's shared struggles with economic hard times and then with the second world war.
I know that before radio and television, there were very contentious political struggles and passionate and even inflammatory rhetoric was used. But, it was in print and took days, if not weeks to reach beyond the immediate audience.
Today, it's instant. And as Marshall McCluhan said many years ago, "The medium is the message." We are still learning what that really means.