Michael Rowe has a good piece over at the Huffington Post about the degradation of American political dialogue.

There was a time when decency, even honor, was an essential part of the American dialogue in its most ideal form, and part of its very identity. There was a time when our culture would have recoiled in horror at the vituperation flowing unchecked from radios, televisions, and the Internet, instead of applauding it as "common sense," "free speech," or "mavericky," or "a spin-free zone."

There was a time when intellectual honesty was not considered unpatriotic; when compassion for, and understanding of, your fellow man was a sign of strength, not weakness. There was a time when the phrase Have you no shame? meant something, and the First Amendment was not used as toilet paper to wipe up the excremental verbal degradation of vulnerable segments of the American population. A time when it was expected that citizens would understand the difference between free speech and irresponsible speech. Somewhere along the line, a cancerous segment of American popular culture and media cunningly exploited the long-standing, honorable American "cowboy" motif and mentality. They grafted cruelty, divisiveness, and ignorance to it, making the two appear indistinguishable, and natural allies. And they are neither, or at least ought not to be.

Amen.

Clearly, I'm not a big fan of Fox News, but truth be told, I'm starting to get a bit of a Fan Girl crush on Shepard Smith. It started with his unequivocal statement that "We are America, We don't F*CKING torture!"



After the shooting at the Holocaust Museum, instead of hunkering down with the rest of the Wingers and denying that any of the anti-Obama hate speech might have had anything to do with it, or that the DHS memoradum, which they'd all screeched was so offensive and unpatriotic, might have actually had some merit after all, Smith expressed concern about the increasing vitriol and hatred in his viewer e-mails:



How refreshing is it to hear a guy on Fox News call the kind of Winger smears we heard during the election "Wrong, ridiculous and preposterous" and actually talking about how these people are "feeding each other the same bunch of hate that's not based in fact"? It gives me hope. Of course, the rest of the nutjob wingers are piling on, calling for him to be fired. I hope he survives because he's the only person I can stand watching on Fox for more than 30 seconds without wanting to puke.