It’s a bad sign for civility when you can’t have a civil conversation about it.
In the days since a deranged assassin gunned down Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 19 other innocents -- six of whom are now dead -- President Barack Obama, Speaker John Boehner and pundits from across the political spectrum have issued calls to raise the discourse and practice mutual respect.
Even Fox News President Roger Ailes, an architect of on- air, anger-based politics, directed his commentators to turn down the heat. What struck some liberals as a hollow gesture was the right gesture nonetheless, and credit goes to Ailes for making it.
An exception to the general comity was celebrity club fighter Sarah Palin, one Fox pundit who seems not to have gotten Ailes’ memo. Yesterday she raised the incivility a notch in a slickly produced video message that was primarily concerned not with the victims of the shooting but with the person who is in her eyes the constant victim: herself.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-13/militant-palin-keeps-crosshairs-on-herself-commentary-by-margaret-carlson.html