Boo Hoo

In comments, as part of the ongoing discussion of Martha-Ann’s breakdown, Pepper of Daily Pepper predicts: “You wait — there will be an expose asking ‘Have politics become too harsh?’”

We don’t have to wait. It’s already happening.

Maybe Martha-Ann Alito's tearful exit from the hearing room yesterday will do for the relentless partisanship in Washington what the Abramoff plea has done for the downward spiral on ethics: inspire introspection and a rush to demonstrate a change of behavior. Between the partisan rancor on display during the Alito hearings, and mounting examples of public servants forgetting their mandate, the time is ripe for a lot of hand-wringing inside the Beltway over how fetid the atmosphere here has become.

So let me get this straight—liberals have been cast as traitors, accused of giving comfort to the enemy, had their politics demonized as anti-American by hatemongers like Limbaugh, Coulter, Malkin, Savage, O’Reilly, Hannity, and their endless stream of imitators, and subjected to all manner of heinous eliminationist rhetoric for years now, but it's the fallacy that Democrats made Alito’s wife cry that's going to force a debate on the tenor of politics? Give me just a small fucking break.

Why wasn’t the time “ripe” for this examination when then-First Lady Hillary Clinton was accused of murder? Or when a book was published suggesting that her daughter was conceived by virtue of her husband raping her? Or any number of other vicious rightwing smears against Clinton that had absolutely fuck-all to do with her politics? Is it because she didn’t cry?

You know, I’ll bet she did—but not in front of a camera.

Spare me the contrived sympathy for the histrionics of someone who sat weeping on C-SPAN like it was a Lifetime Television Movie, and didn’t indicate the faintest inclination to leave during the entire time she was wiping her tears, reaching for tissues, or being consoled. The media has been shamelessly complicit in promulgating an anti-liberal agenda—not just pro-conservative, but anti-liberal—for at least a decade, and it’s nothing more than a bitter amusement that they’ve chosen to seize on an incident which just coincidentally happens to follow that scheme to do some woeful soul-searching about how rancorous political debate has become.