US Elections

Intemperate speech watch

By James Morrow in Sydney

21 April 2010

It’s been quite fashionable to bash the Tea Party lately – Time magazine’s own “Tailgunner” Joe Klein has gone so far as to suggest the movement is approaching the seditious. But when it comes to intemperate language and violence, how’s the other side doing?

Not great, if this report out of California is true:

According to the blog that broke the story, Watch Sonoma County, “North Bay firefighters launched a boycott of a Napa Valley winery this weekend after its owner criticized their wages and benefits in a letter published in the St. Helena Star.” But more than a boycott was launched, as the winery owner has received veiled threats online from some public safety employees, potentially refusing to fight a fire at his home or winery, or save him from choking in a restaurant.

 Hopefully it is not. After all, no one would commit arson for political purposes in Hopey-Changey America, would they?

On the other side of the country, meanwhile, New Jersey’s teachers’ unions are showing their stuff, demonstrating they won’t take Republican Gov. Chris Christie’s calls for salary freezes and budget cuts lying down:

 In Facebook messages visible to the world — not to mention their students — the teachers have called Christie fat, compared him to a genocidal dictator and wished he was dead. The postings are often riddled with bad grammar and misspellings.

"Never trust a fat f...," read one profane post on the Facebook page, "New Jersey Teachers United Against Governor Chris Christie's Pay Freeze," which has some 69,000 fans, many of them teachers.

"How do you spell A-- hole? C-H-R-I-S C-H-R-I-S-T-I-E," read another.

That's all very well and good, but isn’t anyone taking President Obama’s advice to “punch back twice as hard”  literally? Yes, but you have to go to the Big Easy  to find it:

A brutal beating in New Orleans following the Southern Republican Leadership Conference — held in that city from April 8-11 — has challenged the myth regarding the preferred residence of political thuggery.

Circumstantial evidence is piling up that far-left anarchists viciously attacked a staffer to Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, putting Allee Bautsch and her boyfriend Joe Brown in the hospital with broken bones. The story has been, unsurprisingly, ignored.

New Orleans is also the setting for Treme, the coolest show on television. How do I know it’s cool even if it’s not airing in Australia? Because Barack Obama apparently watches it, and Barack Obama is the arbiter of cool - at least among the remaining handful of Americans who still like him.

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