Prime civility bullshit headline from WaPo's Karen Tumulty: "The people concerned about Neera Tanden’s incivility sure didn’t seem to mind the Trump era’s."

I've been writing under the tag "civility bullshit" for years. It represents my longstanding opinion that calls for civility are always bullshit. Certainly in the area of politics, calls for civility always come out when the incivility is hurting your people. When somebody is deploying incivility effectively for your side, you hold your tongue and enjoy the damage. 

But let's consider the Neera Tanden problem. Her incivility is in the past. People on her side enjoyed the damage she inflicted at the time and I don't think any of her people tried to pull her back with calls for civility. It's just that now she's Biden's nominee to head the Office of Management and the Budget, and the old incivility makes her seem like too much of a political hack to be trusted in that position.

Nobody bellyaches about incivility when it's working as a weapon for their side, and the charge of incivility is another political weapon, whipped out when the other side is landing incivility punches on you. 

Here's the Karen Tumulty piece: 

With the defection of Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, [Tanden's] nomination looks to be sunk in the evenly divided Senate if she cannot win the support of at least one Republican.... [Manchin's] stated reason, the “toxic and detrimental impact” of Tanden’s “overtly partisan statements,” is hard to take at face value.

"If Joe Biden succeeds in empowering someone like Neera Tanden without extreme opposition from supposedly adversarial journalists..."

"... not only Democrats but also these media outlets will lose whatever lingering credibility they have to denounce conspiracy theories and to defend the legitimacy of U.S. elections. And they will deserve that fate. You can’t run around expecting people will take you seriously when you warn of the dangers of toxic, moronic conspiracy theories when you yourself embrace, elevate and promote the most prolific and reckless purveyors of them."

 Concludes Glenn Greenwald, in "Biden Appointee Neera Tanden Spread the Conspiracy That Russian Hackers Changed Hillary's 2016 Votes to Trump/How can Democrats and allied media outlets credibly oppose unhinged conspiracy theories and attacks on U.S. election legitimacy while empowering its worst purveyors?" (Substack).

What does "you do you" really mean?

That's a question I had to google after reading "The Thinnest Skins In Media In 2018/Their diapers runneth over" (HuffPo). The first entry on the list is "Jake Tapper, CNN Anchor And Respecter Of Troops." And this exchange is presented as evidence:



See the relevant line, in the middle? "I'm not mad. You misquoted me, I pointed it out, and instead of correcting yourself you reacted like a child. You do you."

My Google search turned up "How ‘You Do You’ Perfectly Captures Our Narcissistic Culture" (NYT, March 2015). Excerpt:

Haters hate; that’s them doing them. No matter how saintly you are, the kittens rescued and orphanages saved from demolition, people yearn to bring you down. Classify your antagonists as haters, however, and your flaws are absolved by their greater sin of envy. Obviously, the haters have other qualities apart from their hatred, but such thinking goes against the very nature of the hermetic tautophrase, which refuses intrusion into the bubble of its logic. The hated-­upon must resist lines of inquiry, like “Haters are inclined to hate, but perhaps I have contributed to this situation somehow by frustrating that natural impulse in all human beings, that of empathy, however submerged that impulse is in this deadened, modern world.” To do otherwise would be to acknowledge your own monstrosity....

And if you're wondering why the thin-skinned media people are depicted as corn in that HuffPo article, the answer is here, at Know Your Meme. The meme goes back to some tweet in 2011, but:

Discourse around the term grew popular again in the beginning of August of 2017. On August 2nd, journalist Yashar Ali tweeted an image of Kamala Harris, a rumored democratic candidate for the 2020 Presidential Election, that called her the "Centrist Corncob" candidate. Ali noted how it was remarkable how the "Bernie Sanders Crew" had mobilized against Harris.... Centrist pundit Al Giordano quoted the tweet stated that the term had homophobic and rape culture origins.... The same day, Neera Tanden, a chief strategist on the Hillary Clinton campaign in the 2016 United States Presidential Election did the same. Both were mocked for misunderstanding the term.

References were different in the old days. If you didn't get them, you had to wonder if you weren't in the know... and how badly out of the know you were. Today, you can instantly become in the know and form a judgment about how out of the know you were. In the case of corncob, it's mindbogglingly insubstantial, but I'm glad to be forewarned against making any precipitous rape-culture allegations.

"Michelle always says, 'When they go low, we go high.' No. No. When they go low, we kick them."

Said Eric Holder, quoted at WaPo in "'When they go low, we kick them': How Michelle Obama’s maxim morphed to fit angry and divided times." Morphed? It's not some kind of updating or evolution. It's the opposite. The only coherence comes from understanding that calls for civility are always bullshit — just a con to get the other side to stand down, because when you think incivility suits your interests, suddenly it's a good thing.

[Holder] said a more antagonistic spirit is “what this new Democratic Party is about,” adding, “We are proud as hell to be Democrats. We are willing to fight for the ideals of the Democratic Party.

He tried to clarify that he wasn’t calling for violence, saying later in his remarks, “I don’t mean we do anything inappropriate, we don’t do anything illegal, but we have to be tough and we have to fight.” A combative strategy, he said, would honor the legacy of civil rights leaders, such as Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) and Martin Luther King Jr.

Yeah, MLK had a "nonviolence" shtick but he would have morphed to fit angry and divided times — if only he hadn't been a victim of violence. But Holder says he is "honor[ing] the legacy" of MLK by getting "combative." Maybe MLK was only choosing a means to an end and didn't have high principles at all, but if so, at least he picked effective tactics. Holder isn't even doing that. The angry aggressive approach is failing. Look at the post-Kavanaugh-hearings polls.

The WaPo article also has the new Hillary Clinton quote (which we talked about yesterday here): "You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about."

It doesn't have the second part of her quote — "That's why I believe, if we are fortunate enough to win back the House and or the Senate, that's when civility can start again" — which I credit for its humorous frankness. It's what I've been saying for years under my "civility bullshit" tag. In that view, Michelle's "When they go low, we go high" never meant we're lofty and principled and stick to our values, but that the idea we're high and they're low is effective rhetoric.

I suspect going high would have been more effective in 2018 than crazy-sounding combativeness, but in choosing a tactic, you're always at risk of being wrong. If you're principled and do what's right as an end in itself, then if it turns out not to get you want you want, you still have your honor. No one needs to follow you. No one needs to believe in you. But I don't think you are in politics. That's why I say calls for civility are always bullshit.

Combativeness isn't a new idea for Democrats, of course. Michelle Obama's line is memorable, but so is "If you get hit, we will punch back twice as hard" (spoken by Obama's deputy chief of staff Jim Messina in 2009).

Other recent rejection of "When they go low, we go high," collected in the WaPo article:

This morning on "Fox News Sunday," Hillary Clinton's surrogates failed her badly.

Earlier today, I said that "Lanny Davis (on 'Fox News Sunday') was the definition of flop sweat," and now I have the transcript. You need the video [HERE] to get the full effect of Davis's agitation and aggression, which is heightened by his blindingly white, fake-looking teeth. Davis was combative and insulting, and resorted to assertions like: "Hillary Clinton today is the most popular politician in the country. And you're discussing a non-scandal, nothing illegal, full access. And it's all politics."

Also on the show to defend Hillary was Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress. Like Davis, she let the stress show and it undercut her arguments (especially as Kimberley Strassel, sitting right next to her, kept giving her the stink eye and undercutting her with quick surgical strikes):

WALLACE: [T]he rules were pretty clear, your e-mails should be preserved.... You think that's with keeping of the spirit if you don't turn these over while you're secretary of state, you don't turn them over when you leave as secretary of state? You don't turn them over until two years after you leave, and it's only after the State Department lawyers confront you?

TANDEN: OK, that's also faster than any previous secretary of state passed over the e-mails... So, I'm saying that now we'll be able to see, turned over, taking the act of actually turning over the e-mails to the public. I think let's, you know, I know it's hard to imagine, but let's take a breath, she what are in those e-mails and then decide.

STRASSEL: Well, the e-mails she's chosen to give to the State Department.

TANDEN: Well, just to be clear about this. If a cabinet secretary today was using private and public e-mail, right, and the other cabinet secretary, they're making the decision when they decide to use public e-mail, right? So, that's the decision they're making. There's no private -- there's no public record of their private e-mail.

STRASSEL: Which is exactly why the Obama administration said use your government e-mail –

TANDEN: Where appropriate –

STRASSEL: -- because these e-mails belong to the public. They don't belong to them.

TANDEN: Exactly. And she's turning them over. So, that's what we'll see.

STRASSEL: The ones she chose to turn in.

Strassel ruled that exchange.

Wallace then turned to George Will and asks him "How big a deal is this?"

GEORGE WILL: It's big because it is axiomatic that the worst political scandals are those that reinforce a pre-existing negative perception... The Clintons come trailing clouds of entitlement and concealment, and legalistic, Jesuitical reasoning, the kind of people who could find a loophole in a stop sign. The -- her obvious motive was to conceal. You conceal in order to control. And that's what makes this literally, strictly speaking, Orwellian. In George Orwell's novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four", Oceania's regime, the totalitarian regime had an axiom, "He who controls the past controls the future. And he who controls the present controls the past." This is a way of controlling what we will know about the history of our country and it is deeply sinister.

Tanden attempts damage control and it's quite painful (though funny):

TANDEN: Orwell, sinister, I mean, why don't we ask her, instead of attacking and deriding. See the e-mail and then make judgment.

STRASSEL: Why do you think she did it?

WALLACE: But don't you agree that there's a problem –

TANDEN: This is unbelievable to me, Orwellian. We can all use these words –

WALLACE: -- when the e-mails we're going to see, these 55,000 pages, are only what she and her lawyers decided to turn over.

TANDEN: Again, they're the public e-mails. She has e-mails I'm sure about the bridesmaids dresses. Do we have a right to see those e-mails? She has friends like me that said, how is my sister doing? Do we have the right to see those?

See how Tanden is unwittingly making the argument against Clinton? It's quite obvious at this point that Clinton has reserved for herself the power to determine which of the mixed public and private emails will be called public and handed over. What's to stop her from putting anything she doesn't want us to see in the private category? Benghazi... bridesmaids... what's the difference?  Wallace drives this home:

WALLACE: No, but I'm saying to you that she sat there -- what if there's an e-mail about Benghazi and she gets –

TANDEN: And that's what the lawyers will see those, exactly.

WALLACE: Not if she didn't turn them over.

TANDEN: The State Department going to see those e-mails and any e-mail on Benghazi to a public e-mail, other people had documentation as well.

STRASSEL: So, you're saying the State Department is going to see her server?

TANDEN: No, I'm saying that –

(CROSSTALK)

WALLACE: What do you think bout the idea of allowing an independent person to go in as you heard Lanny Davis talk about to see her server?

TANDEN: So, I would just see what the e-mails we have are and make decisions on that. We have two years into a presidential cycle, why don't we actually get these e-mails out in the public and see if there's a -- we will have more public e-mails. We'll have more e-mails public than any secretaries of state in the history –

STRASSEL: Possibly none that actually matter?

TANDEN: No, not possibly none that actually matter.

WALLACE: Let me bring Juan in-- Juan.

JUAN WILLIAMS, FOX NEWS POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, I must say first of all, Hillary Clinton seems to me to be very entitled and privileged and she broke the rules. So, I don't think there are any questions. As to whether or not she broke the law, that's not clear.

WALLACE: I agree.

WILLIAMS: But I will say this, in terms of the politics of 2016, which is really what I think we're driving at here, is that Hillary Clinton scares Republicans to death. I think that's what we've seen. Initially Democrats, including the Obama White House this week, did not defend Hillary Clinton, because the Obama White House wanted to make it clear they had set a clear rules of the road for Hillary Clinton, and they backed off. There was radio silence. I was over there this week. Radio silence on this. But by the end of the week, with all of this talk of subpoenas on Benghazi, and then all of the stuff about, doesn't this remind you of how technical and Orwellian the Clintons are -- suddenly, the Democrats, and we see this with Neera this morning, have become more defensive. And I think the idea is, you know what? Republicans are feasting, they are in a frenzy. They think this is Watergate redux, and it's not.

WALLACE: OK. But you know sometimes when you feast, it's Thanksgiving.