On the lack of courtesy in public debate

You kidding? "Limp-wristed liberals," "environmental whackos" and the like were continuously plastered all through the Reign of Reagan.

 

Believe me, Kennedy/Nixon was vicious, especially at the off-the-national-cameras levels.

 

Of course there's always been a certain amount of that kind of stuff. But Reagan valued a cooperative spirit between people - after the business of government was over, you could be friendly. Now the mindset is closer to the Roman attitude about Carthage.

 

Exactly...Reagan was a happy warrior. He was a likeable, funny guy, so when he tore into the Democrats, it didn't have that edge, like when some rotten human being like Gingrich or Tom DeLay does it. At the time, the Democratic opposition was people like Tip O'Neil, who was also a decent guy and not a snarling partisian.
Of course, I could be wrong about all this, since I was in elementary school during the Reagan administration, so my impressions are based on half-remembered things and what I read in recent histories. I think between the post-Watergate cleanup and Reagan being an optimistic, positive person, the mid-70s to late-80s was probably an era of good feeling, politically.

 

The mid-70s to early 80s sucked. First, Nixon wins in a landslide, marking the end of the 1960s idea that progressive thinking could change the nation. Then, less than 2 years later, Watergate mushrooms into a fiasco, and everyone who voted for Nixon feels like an idiot.

Then, the economy tanks, and Ford presides over a slight downward dip, losing the election in 1976 due to his pardon of Nixon, and the liberals are in charge with Carter, but he can't get anything done because the economy is tanking (the aftereffects 8 years of Nixon-Ford stewardship as well as LBJ's bungling) and he has few enough ideas of his own to improve anything, so the country is ready for a smiling old senile cowboy who talks like he knows what he's doing.

 

Could there be such a thing as being too civil or too courteous?
Once I heard Doug Urbanski praise Michael Savage and Ann Coulter for "sharpening the debate."
What does that mean and why is it a good thing?

 

There's no such thing as a red state or blue state. They're all various shades of purple...

 

Reagan was a raving leftist in his earlier days, before he became the preferred
ventreloquist dummy for a cadre of sharp righties.

 

A rejoinder, and a reminder, to Peggums:
http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/10/peggy-noonans-poetic-love-of-dissent.html

 

Just read the Noonan column.Gobsmacked.

Does she actually think anyone other than Friends of Fredo is going to believe that codswallop?

 

No walloping your cod around here, lad.

 

I used to think Peggy Noonan was OK-like Bill Buckley in his Gore Vidal days.

That column is bordering on delusional.