Political incivility watch: Havesi and Malkin

Our political discourse continues to sink to new lows.

The state comptroller of New York, Alan Havesi, was forced to apologize after praising Senator Chuck Schumer as a metaphorical presidential assassin:

The man who, how do I phrase this diplomatically, who will put a bullet between the president's eyes if he could get away with it. The toughest senator, the best representative. A great, great member of the Congress of the United States.

Meanwhile, conservative authors continue to outstrip my readers in their ability to generate inflammatory titles for their books. Andrew Sullivan flags a new tome titled The Marketing of Evil. Worse still, the book features this appalling cover quote from Michelle Malkin: "Now watch the cockroaches run for cover."

As one of Sullivan's readers pointed out, Malkin is engaging in explicit dehumanization:

What is disturbing is when incivility moves to dehumanization. One need look no further than Rwanda to see the cockroach invective in play. The Hutus commonly referred to the Tutsis as "inyenzi," literally meaning cockroach. Though I'm certain that people like Malkin aren't about to go on a machete waltz, the fact that political debate has devolved from disagreement to dehumanization is not a good sign. No good can come out of dehumanizing someone on the basis of politics.

When will we cast these people out of public life?

Comments

[Sean]

Also, take into account that Malkin really came into the public eye with her book about the justification of the internment of Japanese-Americans in the United States during World War II. One obvious result of the dehumanizing of people is the loss of their civil liberties, something that doesn't seem to bother the extreme right these days.

That would depend on which extreme right your talking about libertarians are pretty honked off at Congress' disinterest at checking Executive power, but the religious right is more concerned about making sure Jesus' priorities get taken care of. Those priorities would of course be abortion and gay marriage.