Wise words

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman had a very thought-provoking article yesterday. He began by drawing a parallel between the poisoned political atmosphere that exists in the U.S. today -- culminating in the FaceBook entry polling readers as to whether Obama should be killed -- with that in Israel leading up to the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.

I've had a similar foreboding feeling of something ominously different, but I had not linked it to Rabin's assassination. Friedman's parallels are frightening: It's not the differing of opinion on issues or even the vociferous voicing of those differences. It's the delegitimizing and the vitriolic attacks. As Friedman says about 1995:

And in so doing they created a poisonous political environment that was interpreted by one right-wing Jewish nationalist as a license to kill Rabin — he must have heard, “God will be on your side” — and so he did.

And what about 2009?

And Mr. Obama is now having his legitimacy attacked by a concerted campaign from the right fringe. They are using everything from smears that he is a closet “socialist” to calling him a “liar” in the middle of a joint session of Congress to fabricating doubts about his birth in America and whether he is even a citizen. And these attacks are not just coming from the fringe. Now they come from Lou Dobbs on CNN and from members of the House of Representatives.

He ends his article with an attempt to understand what has happened to us as a nation:

The American political system was, as the saying goes, “designed by geniuses so it could be run by idiots.” But a cocktail of political and technological trends have converged in the last decade that are making it possible for the idiots of all political stripes to overwhelm and paralyze the genius of our system.

Those factors are: the wild excess of money in politics; the gerrymandering of political districts, making them permanently Republican or Democratic and erasing the political middle; a 24/7 cable news cycle that makes all politics a daily battle of tactics that overwhelm strategic thinking; and a blogosphere that at its best enriches our debates, adding new checks on the establishment, and at its worst coarsens our debates to a whole new level, giving a new power to anonymous slanderers to send lies around the world. Finally, on top of it all, we now have a permanent presidential campaign that encourages all partisanship, all the time among our leading politicians.

I would argue that together these changes add up to a difference of degree that is a difference in kind — a different kind of American political scene that makes me wonder whether we can seriously discuss serious issues any longer and make decisions on the basis of the national interest.

We can’t change this overnight, but what we can change, and must change, is people crossing the line between criticizing the president and tacitly encouraging the unthinkable and the unforgivable.

Wise words, indeed.

Ralph