The state we're in

How dysfunctional is American political culture today? The Howler has a great description of it (06/21/05). This is a long excerpt. But go read the whole post.

We agree with something Craig Crawford said on last Friday’s Imus in the Morning. "Why does anybody ever compare anything to the Nazis?" the droll pundit asked, discussing the ludicrous Dick Durbin flap. "I don’t know why anybody ever brings up the Nazis—it always goes wrong...There’s just no percentage in talking about the Nazis." But Crawford went on to suggest the obvious—that the flap about Durbin is fake and insane. "All the opponents, the Bush administration backers, are saying that he’s calling all the troops Nazis. This is just nuts," Crawford said, early on, when few others were doing so. Later, Crawford said something else that is obvious—except in the bizarro world of the American "mainstream" press corps. "This is what’s happening," Crawford told Imus. "You can’t criticize anything about this war without being accused of not supporting the troops." Crawford got it right that morning (more below)—and the fakery and lunacy have only grown in the four days that have passed.

Indeed, the lunacy of the flap about Durbin shows the disturbing point we’ve now reached; if you’re a Democrat, a "firestorm" can quickly spread around you if you make remarks which are perfectly accurate. In this case, a Democrat actually did say something that’s about as mundane as "the sky is blue." Have you read that FBI report—the report which Durbin was discussing? No one would associate the conduct it describes with the nation described in our civics texts, with the country you were taught to believe in as school kids. But given our modern press culture, Crawford was right; it’s foolish for Dems to mention Hitler... Yes, it’s only foolish because our discourse is now in the hands of fakers and crackpots. But then, this unpleasant fact has been fairly plain at least since early in Campaign 2000. At THE HOWLER, we’ve written about this every day—every day for the past seven years! And as we’ve done so, fiery "career liberals" have hid from this fact, because it might hurt their careers.

In the lunatic attacks on Durbin—in the lunatic attacks on average citizens disturbed by the troubling Downing Street memos—we finally see what these years of silence have, at long last, brought us. How crazyhas our press culture become?

... When they came for Gore, these self-dealers kept quiet. Now they have come for our sanity. ...

But we’ve now reached a miraculous point in the crumbling of our discourse. We’ve reached the point where citizens are mocked by major scribes for wondering if we were lied into war—and where United States senators are told to apologize for denouncing the conduct described in that report. But then, lunacy has spread throughout our discourse over the course of the past dozen years. And your fiery "career liberals" have known to be silent. They looked away again and again. Now we see what that has bought us.