Prometheus 6

I'm going to write a few letters to a few journalists. This bit below will be the heart of it.

Somehow it has come to this: a candidate for the office of President of the United States is accused of inciting race riots. The discussion of it has subsided...but that doesn't mean the impact of the accusation has passed.

It started when Bob Lewis wrote a story that badly distorted a speech Sen. Obama gave on June 5^th in Chicago Virginia. The story used threatening language that didn't appear anywhere in the speech. It is possible Mr. Lewis is so accustomed to our current practice of doing and saying things to “send the message” he assumed Sen. Obama was code talking, reflexively translating his words into something entirely other than what he said. Possibly innocent, but the result was absurd.

One would hope absurdities like this would be screened out by the editorial process. Unfortunately, it was not. And worse...Mr. Lewis was writing for the Associated Press wire service. This means the story was picked up and run by the New York Times, USA Today, Time Magazine, MSNBC, and countless newspapers and web sites around the world.

Think about that. Think about the authority the story assumes simply by appearing in these venues.

I have to be honest. I allowed for the possibility that Mr. Lewis meant no conscious harm but I can't believe he didn't know how wrong his interpretation is any more than I can accept that Rush Limbaugh and Tucker Carlson truly believed Sen. Obama was inciting race riots.

Yet sitting on national media pedestals, that's exactly what they said they believe. Tucker Carlson accused Obama of “giving a political justification to totally unacceptable, never justifiable behavior.” And Rush Limbaugh perfected the art of political projection when he said, “This guy was inciting, he was inciting riots. ... it is dangerous, it is reckless.”

The majority of Rush Limbaugh's audience and a significant fraction of Tucker Carlson's audience now believe this distortion as gospel. An incredible shot of toxic material has been injected into the Conservative base's world view. Both men knew this would happen.

Think about that. Think about its impact on the very possibility of racial reconciliation.

I was hoping to see the charge thoroughly debunked. I have only seen one attempt to do so, by Roland Martin on CNN. And this is disappointing.

Jonah Goldberg, whose positions I rarely agree with, knows there is a limit.

But too many partisans on both sides sound like Beevis and Butthead, tittering over trivia. More important, if political correctness is as absurd as so many people think it is, why is it so successful? This newspaper, your local schools, police and fire departments, city hall, your church and workplace all likely subscribe to vast swaths of what was once called a politically correct agenda, from rules barring sexual harassment to the language you can use in casual conversation or e-mails. Surely if PC is the Orwellian imposition so many conservatives claim it is, Americans would reject it the way they resisted other alien impositions, such as the metric system, bidets or David Hasselhoff's Germanic personality cult.

The reality is that most political correctness — the successful part — is a necessary attempt to redefine good manners in a sexually and racially integrated society. Good manners are simply those things you do to demonstrate respect to others and contribute to social decorum. Aren't conservatives the natural defenders of proper manners?

But his is not about political correctness. This is about the ability to even hold an honest conversation on the central issues dividing the nation: poverty and race.

There's a limit, a line that has been crossed. We need to take note of the fact.