Can We Move On? My Guess is No.

It's all in how you say it...

With the memorial service in Arizona over, several victims laid to rest and Gabby Gifford facing a long and no doubt painful and difficult recovery, my guess is we will start to turn the page on Saturday's shooting.  It's been almost a week, and Snooki will probably do something sooner or later that will draw the attention of America's Fourth Estate.

Palin poked her head out of her snow covered burrow to deflect blame from herself for the shooting.  As Ezra Klein - who is unconvinced that uncivil public discourse had anything to do with the shooting - put it, Palin never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.  She might have deflected criticism AND been magnanimous and gracious, but then, she wouldn't be our little Sarah if she did that.

The more I think about it, the real problem with our "public discourse" is not the incivility, but the incredibly fact-free nature of it.  Satire and exaggeration have their place, but Glenn Beck routinely compares liberals to Nazis and Jonah Goldberg wrote a "book" called "Liberal Fascism".  Now I teach political theory.  Fascism and Liberalism are antithetical.  And to be "liberal" means different things from society to society, but it is difficult to imagine a civilization anywhere at any time in which Fascism would be considered liberal.

The GOP has declared that ACA - which is based largely along lines proposed by Bob Dole in 1993 and mirrors legislation signed by Mitt Romney in the past decade - is the gravest threat to personal liberty since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

It is, above all, the lack of perspective and factual accuracy that mars our discourse.  You can have your own opinions, but you can't have your own facts.  "Fascism" as a word does not mean: political ideas I don't like.  It means a militaristic, corporatist state with strong appeals to nationalism and racial identity with no respect for civil rights or civil liberties.  That's fascism.  Not health care reform.

I feel strongly about this, because this is my job.  I try and teach young people to marshall evidence and make arguments that are sustainable by logic and explicated evidence.  I would fail most adults in the GOP for their performances over the last two years.

Ultimately, the argument over HCR came down to an intraparty squabble over accepting the '93 GOP plan or adding a public option.  The Democrats accepted the '93 plan and moved on.  They did not burn the Reichstag to do this.  And tellingly, the more people hear about what the bill actually does, the more popular it becomes.

Similarly, the GOP ran on fear mongering over the deficit.  They then INSIST on keeping extraordinarily low tax rates on the rich, despite the effect it will have on the deficit, and when you press them about what they want to cut, they tug their collars and say, "I'll get back to you."  Numbers are not subject to personal perspective.

I don't need a civil debate, I need a responsible one.  One where we all agree that Vince Foster committed suicide, the Clintons lost money on Whitewater, Obama was born in Hawaii and providing health care to people who don't have it is not the death of liberty.

This isn't making as much sense as I wanted it to.  I'm tuckered out from shoveling snow.  I have a hunch I'll revisit this when I'm not dog tired.