Civility: It All Depends

Throughout the week-long tribute to the late Senator John McCain we found ourselves instructed in the need for a more respectful dialogue in our politics, and President Trump was often tacitly chastised for setting an uncivil tone in his speeches and tweets.

The president deserves to be criticized (though not, for heaven's sake, during a memorial service) for frequently adulterating the quality of our public discourse, but the irony here is that the lectures on civility during the McCain memorials were often delivered by members of the same party which has given us the chaotic, disgraceful circus that has accompanied the Kavanaugh hearings.

It's hard to take seriously calls for courtesy and civility from people who have so far refused to condemn the deplorable behavior of their colleagues on the Senate Judiciary Committee or of the rank and file activists in the gallery.

David French at NRO describes the clown show that the Democrats put on Tuesday. Here's an excerpt:

[Y]esterday, from the top down, from senators to protesters to online trolls, the Democrats offered a preview of how they’d react to any Republican nominee, and it was a shining example of how and why conservatives don’t believe for one moment that Donald Trump is the sole source of American dysfunction.

Consider first the utterly frivolous behavior of multiple Democratic senators. Within seconds of the hearing’s start they interrupted Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Charles Grassley with demands that he adjourn the hearing.

The pretext was one of those eye-glazing Washington debates over document production, in which senators who’d already vowed weeks ago to vote against Kavanaugh claimed they couldn’t possibly evaluate him properly based on the hundreds of thousands of pages they already had (including more than a decade of judicial opinions).

They instead absolutely needed every scrap of paper he ever touched, so . . . what? They could cast a more emphatic no vote?

By one count the proceedings were interrupted 76 times in two hours, and to what end? So that the senators could show their extremist base that they're determined to resist the inevitable appointment of an eminently qualified jurist?

No one disputes that Brett Kavanaugh is supremely qualified to serve on the Supreme Court, but he's tainted by being the nominee of the hated and terrifying Trumpenstein monster and so must be opposed by whatever means necessary, no matter how rude, vulgar and unseemly.

The Democratic senators at least tried to camouflage their rudeness with a patina of polite language, but the activists who somehow managed to insinuate themselves into the room flavored their buffoonery with angry, screeching insults.

French adds,

Let’s be clear, had angry Tea Party protesters caused the same scale of disruption at a Democratic hearing, news outlets would be shaking their heads at the dangerous lack of respect for a dignified nominee. Instead, all too many folks think this is what democracy looks like: serial attempts to exercise an incoherent, screaming heckler’s veto.

Indeed. Here's a clip of some of the goings-on:

The behavior of these folks was even more absurdly comical than the clip reveals. Apparently, denizens of the twitterverse went berserk at the secret white supremacy hand signals they espied being flashed by a young woman, a lawyer of Mexican and Jewish descent, mind you, sitting behind Judge Kavanaugh.

The Twitterites' outrage meters were also registering in the red after Judge Kavanaugh's unconscionable snub, which turns out to have been no snub at all, of a man who turned out to be the father of a student slain at Parkland High School, apparently set on embarrassing the judge.

You can read about these faux enormities in French's column. Sadly, when people are desperate to find something, anything, to be scandalized about they'll cling to any straw which presents itself, real or imagined, and no matter how foolish it makes them look.