Calm down, says Doug Tice
Please don’t, says Judge J. Michael Luttig
Retired commentary editor D.J. Tice begins his homily in the Star Tribune on Sunday, July 27th with a story from the 60s — the halcyon days of the boomers — a Star Trek episode about a malevolent force that kept a group from the Enterprise and a group of Klingons locked in combat that never killed anybody but just kept everybody enraged and at each other’s throats. The malevolent force fed on the rage.
Although Tice doesn’t mention it, recall that the Klingons (in the original series anyway; they got the woke treatment in subsequent iterations) were really the bad guys, genuine MAGA types.
It is a pretty good description of Twitter, really; Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry told many stories in the series that had a moral lesson. It wasn’t Macbeth, but it was something. In recounting the story, Tice sets up the point of his piece:
I’m not entirely alone in being struck by how overwrought and overblown the emotional tone of the American dialogue seems just now — how out of proportion the fear and rage abroad in the land seem to the nation’s actual problems and sufferings.
Well, there is fear and rage abroad, if you just look around.
Trump is the C word – from X – provenance unknown
Some of the fear and loathing is here, too, of course, including by eminent conservative legal scholar and retired federal circuit court judge, J. Michael Luttig:
Everything America has stood for and that Americans have believed in for almost two hundred and fifty years is under attack today by the President of the United States and his Administration, with the wholehearted support of the Republican Congress . . .
D.J. advances the proposition that the emotional tone is “overwrought and overblown,” and the reaction of our friends in Scotland (who have no trouble expressing themselves) and Judge Luttig is just fainting couch stuff.
Conservatives are fine with a Minnesota Republican House member telling fellow legislators they are going to hell, or the Director of National Intelligence accusing Barak Obama of committing treason without any evidence, in fact, in the face of evidence to the contrary.
But when the heat gets turned up on them, over say, Trump’s relationship with Epstein, or the administration’s tariff fiasco, or immigration cruelty, or even Trump’s flouting the law at every turn, they’re all “let’s be civil,” or “this is a both sider issue.” Tice spends 1600 words on his turgid polemic.
I was reminded today of a story I wrote twenty years ago on my old blog, The Cucking Stool. When she had a regular column in the Strib, Katherine Kersten would write from time to time on the importance of tolerating intolerance. I think my comments on the concept hold up pretty well.
N.B. – There are links to several of my commentaries to op-eds by Doug Tice in the sidebar to this point. I hadn’t read them for a while, but I rather like them.
Doug Tice is immutable.
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