Caution: Spit take alert: If you’re still working on your morning coffee, you’d better put your mug down before reading any further.
All set? OK, here goes. Debbie Wasserman Schultz has written a book. Assuming you’ve managed to shake off the sillies, let’s continue. In the tome, titled “For the Next Generation: A Wake-Up Call to Solving Our Nation’s Problems,” the Democratic Party chair proves once again that she’s as smart as she is pretty.
In a chapter titled “Discourse, Not Discord,” she writes (h/t Weekly Standard):
Differences of opinion are natural and healthy aspects of a democracy governed by two parties, and we must be able to express these differences with civility. But as anyone who has observed Washington knows, we are not always able to hold ourselves to these standards of conduct. The modern political climate is nastier than any in recent memory, marked by party members who tend to hector one another when they should be engaged in constructive debate. [Emphasis added]
Charity, as they say, starts at home. It is thus interesting that Wasserman Schultz didn’t cite examples of “nastiness” and “hectoring” from members of her own caucus, but her excuse might be lead time required by publishers between receipt of an edited manuscript and a book’s release date. Perhaps she affixed the words “The End” to her manuscript in advance of the president’s labeling the opposition party extortionists, hostage takers, and anarchists. Maybe she was napping when her House colleague, Rep. George Miller, accused Republicans of committing “Jihad against American citizens” or when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said they were “holding a gun to the head of the American people.”
Wasserman Schultz still has a chance to correct the record with publishing an erratum sheet. She will almost certainly be doing a promotional tour, which will give her a chance to explain how Barack Obama’s petulant and unpresidential behavior in the wake of the partial government shutdown has not shown smallness and incivility. It’s possible that in her private world, sending out SWAT teams armed with tear gas to confront aging veterans pushing aside barriers at D.C. monuments is not a hostile and uncivil act.
UPDATE: Apropos of the focus on civility, it is worth commenting on this sign, which was on display today in front of the Capitol. The person holding the sign isn’t just any cretin. He is a member of the president’s dark money group, Organizing for Action.
Rep. Steve Stockman, who follows LU on Twitter, perhaps identified the problem here best when he tweeted:
Will @CNN ask @WhiteHouse why @BarackObama‘s official @OFA events mock the mentally challenged?
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