Is there anything richer than the toxically biased liberal media lecturing the rest of the country about the need for comity and bipartisanship? We're two years into an epic crusade of Trump-trashing, and they're telling the rest of America to calm down and not lurch into hyperbole. Cue Time magazine, with its infamous melty-face covers of Trump -- the wishful-thinking meltdown covers didn't get Hillary elected, although they get an A for Aggression.
Time magazine put Uber, and not Steve Scalise, on the cover of its June 26 edition. Washington bureau chief Michael Scherer penned a brief article headlined "A shooting and the risks of political outrage." This came six pages into their section "The Brief." Their lead story in that section was "Britain stumbles toward exit talks with a reinvigorated Europe." Online, the Scherer piece was headlined "The Virginia Shooting and America's Creeping National Disease."
Scherer delayed addressing the Republican-hating views of shooter James Hodgkinson until paragraph eight of an 11-paragraph piece, and then came the "mainstream" media's knee-jerk tendency to blur the leftist violence into a bipartisan problem. In this case, Scherer blurred shooting Scalise and other Republicans to a Montana Republican "body-slamming" a reporter:
Hodgkinson was known in his hometown as a political activist, and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders said his name appeared on the volunteer rolls of his presidential campaign. Hodgkinson had a history of violent behavior, and his social feed was a dark parody of the dismal state of the nation's political discourse, where disagreement is personal and anger is visceral. He had joined groups called Terminate the Republican Party and The Road to Hell Is Paved With Republicans.
In this way, Hodgkinson was just another symptom of a creeping national disease. Rarely a week goes by these days without new evidence that the debate over ideas and policy is giving way to violence. Opposing protesters attack one another from the streets of St. Paul or Berkeley. A soon-to-be-elected Congressman in Montana body-slammed a reporter for asking an unwelcome question the day before the election. Vile comments once considered unfit for public discourse are common currency online.
Gianforte was violent, but it doesn't really compare to a shooting that puts you in critical condition. Time was also pushing Gianforte around by publishing an AP report with this headline: "Montana Congressman Greg Gianforte Calls for Civility After Being Convicted of Assault." AP's Matt Volz showed some real wire-service persistence, refusing to move on. Gianforte "repeated nine times over the course of Friday's half-hour interview that he had taken responsibility and wanted to move on." Volz wanted to test the pol's patience?
Five pages after Scherer disposed of the Scalise story, "The View" section of the magazine led off with a story on the Trump-stabbed-to-death play in Central Park. The headline was "Never mind Trump. We need Shakespeare more than ever."
Editor-at-large David Von Drehle was so insulting that he called the Trump-assassination plot "a little scandal and titillation," and then suggested conservative outrage was utterly insincere, the fakest of news: "Equally predictable were the stagy howls of protest from supposedly outraged right-wing media, which reckoned the play made a case for assassination, while most Shakespeare scholars say quite the opposite." The "transgressive artists and the defenders of decency" storyline was "as stale as Popeye vs. Bluto." The story didn't mention Time Warner's funding of this stabfest.
Von Drehle concluded: "In our own blinkered era, Shakespeare asks us to fling open the doors of our own minds -- a true act of resistance to the wall-building spirit of us against them."
So apparently, Time isn't us, or them. They are the open-minded nonpartisans. They apparently have no idea how arrogant and clueless they sound.
