Yesterday a Kossack was joking about sending Jenna Bush to Iraq and immediately the joke was carried forward into the notion of comfort women. A little while back a Kossack described the president’s wife in passing as frigid, and today I noticed a reference to “Bitch Barbara Bush.” I wish they wouldn’t do that. I wish we wouldn’t do that.
Why do we give away the store like this?
We complain about the loss of comity in politics and we accuse the freerepublic crowd of pure-dee ad hominem hydrophobia. We’re outraged when they launch personal attacks on Hillary Clinton. We were outraged when they made belittling remarks about the growing Chelsea. So why is it OK for us, the progressive bloggers, to launch these vicious little zingers?
After the whole pie business, regardless of which side one was on, I thought it might have raised consciousness all around, but this is apparently not the case. So you strongly disagree with the policies of the Bush administration, so that smirk drives you batty — how does this make Laura Bush frigid? So Jenna’s an airhead. How does that make it ok to talk about pimping her out on the battlefield? Jenna is no more involved in politics than my cats. Having read Al Franken, I’m as taken aback as anybody by some aspects of Barbara Bush’s personality, but how does it help the Democratic cause to call her names?
And yes, Ann Coulter says terrifying and irresponsible things, and she is a political player, but instead of rebutting her (perhaps not possible because she’s so off-the-wall) or ignoring her more irrational stuff, I see so-called progressive males sexually assaulting her with words over and over again.
Liberal bloggers regularly report back from their tours of such places as freerepublic with incendiary excerpts of posts from “over there”. May I ask what is the point of giving the freepers fuel for their own reconnoiters? When people post these offhand insults, do they never think beyond their own corner of the bar?
I love and reward quality snark as much as the next person, but I wish we could limit our targets to the people actually implementing the policies we hate so much, and leave the non-participants alone. Surely we can disrespect the participants as snidely and cleverly as we want, but find a way to do so without the trashing of the family members, sexually or otherwise.
Sadly, I don’t have the courage to post this on dailyKos, even though that’s where I’ve witnessed this sort of thing taking place, because I don’t want to be piled on. I’ve already had that experience in real life. But this isn’t just a rant about sexism; it’s about grace in debate, the sort of thing that garners respect from one’s opponents.
