Friday, October 31, 2003

Norms of Civility

People can link to whomever they want to, but justifying your linking behavior based on some norms of civility and then linking to Andrew Sullivan is a bit, well...

My norm of civility is, roughly, tit for tat. I'm civil to people who are civil to me and "libruls" more generally, and I'm not civil to people who aren't. There's no point in trying to waste time grappling with why exactly Ann and Andy think I'm a traitor who secretly wants Osama and Saddam to establish a Muslim Theocracy in America, because after all theocracies are what liberals are all about!

More generally, there's no point in trying to get the people who have spent years debasing the political discourse in this country to elevate it. And, there's also no point in grappling with why exactly some people are now pretending that somehow it was those evil liberals who have lowered the quality of discourse.

It wasn't the Democrats that had HateRadio-Apalooza on the White House lawn.