The Political Left's New "Civility"

The 2011 Labor-Day weekend rhetoric from the political left certainly didn't fall short of one's expectations, but then this writer's expectations for that group are rather low.

VP Joe Biden got things off to a roaring start at a weekend rally of union leaders and members, calling anyone opposing the Democrat record and future agenda "Barbarians at the Gates." If people peacefully making their presence known and speaking up about balancing the Federal budget and controlling runaway entitlement spending are barbarians, one wonders what the appropriate term would be for such leftist groups as the Chicago Seven (1968) and their supporters, including Barack Obama's former committee colleague in Chicago politics, the notorious Bill Ayers, who helped lead one of the most violent urban riots (Days of Rage, 1969) in the last century and was involved in bombing plots.

Even more disturbing were the remarks of Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa while introducing President Obama at a Detroit rally on Labor Day.  He assured our President that "Big Labor" is an army ready to march under the rallying flag and cry, "Let's take out the sons a bitches" [sic]. Especially in the context of an army marching and the Hoffa family "legacy" in the "hit" business, the idiom "take out" has most ominous implications indeed.  In fact, I might be unwisely placing myself in danger for simply writing this article.

This is the same political group that criticized last year some conservatives' use of the words "targeting" and "cross hairs" to identify and focus on congressional districts "winable" in the 2012 mid-term elections and then who wanted us to believe these words played a role in Congresswoman's Giffords' shooting. But that argument fell apart when the attacker turned out to be a deranged person with no  history of right-wing associations.

So if the Left thought words such as "targeting" were incendiary ones encouraging violence, why aren't they, beginning with the President, who surely heard about Hoffa's use of "take out", even more outraged by Hoffa's threatening language, since the latter's speech was multiple times more likely to incite violence, to say nothing of the recent release of a new video game in which players can "take out" leading conservative politicans and Fox News personalities. While not even a peep about this outrage in the mainstream media, one can only imagine what  their 24/7 coverage would be for anything remotely similar originating with the political right.

  Instead, the President is quoted as saying he's proud of Hoffa and remained silent as to how the words "take out" could possibly be within the bounds of  the "civil" speech  standard  he loftily called for in his famous Tucson  memorial address to the nation on January 19, 2010.

The hypocrisy of this double-standard confirms once again that the Left has completely lost any remaining credibility in their calls for more "civility" in our political rhetoric. President Obama's 2008 campaign theme of "hope and change" has sadly turned into "smoke and mirrors".

There's an old saying that applies to those like the Left and our President lecturing others on what's the right  and decent thing to do, namely, "I'd rather you would walk with me than merely show the way."