Numb to incivility

Every now and then I am reminded of how truly inured our culture has become to a lack of civility and decorum in this, the age of Felon47.

Sometimes it happens just in my daily life encountering people "in the wild," like a couple of Sundays ago with the road rager and the overly-macho softball player, but more often it happens when I'm watching/reading/listening to the news. People, sometimes high-level officials even, think nothing of just oozing hostility and contempt to whomever they're speaking to. With no provocation at all, it's just the default—be belligerent.

What brings this up today is the recent questioning of the idiotic caricature of machismo masquerading as the Secretary of Defense. A reporter asked him quite reasonable questions about the indefensible, pointless, illegal, and wholly counterproductive war with Iran (though the reporter did not use those descriptors), and Secretary Kegstand responded with insults and dismissive doubletalk and ridiculous propaganda. The reporters, sadly, let him do so without pushback.

REPORTER:  You've just mentioned you plan to strike [Iran] hard tonight. If [that includes] hitting bridges and electrical infrastructure, how is that not a war crime? Targeting civilian infrastructure?

HEGSETH: That's precisely the kind of disingenuous question I'm used to from the media, impugning the motives of the folks on our side who are incredibly professional and incredibly effective.

Hegseth goes on to blather about how Iran's military sucks and how they need to "negotiate" with Felon47 and his staff of criminals, but he never addresses the question at all. And the reporter let's him get away with it! The reporter does not say, when Hegseth is done with his word-vomit, "sir, none of that addresses the issue of hitting civilian targets and war crimes," nor anything else of value. He does not say, "there is nothing disingenuous about my question, the US has already bombed water facilities and you've given no indication that you think that was anything other than good targeting." He does not say, "my question has nothing to do with 'folks on our side,' it has to do with decision-making by the Defense Department. You know, the agency you are in charge of."

Hegseth is utterly worthless as a government official. Worse than worthless, he produces negative worth. But this sort of reportage is also worthless. Why the media just parrots this guy and allows him to spout bullshit and hurl insults at them is, to say the least, counterproductive.

Of course, it starts at the top—the alleged President of the United States does exactly the same thing and thus people in positions like SecDef emulate his uncivil behavior, but unacknowledged alcoholic Pete Hegseth seems like the kind of guy who is just this way in every aspect of his life. I can imagine domestic interactions at home, with Mrs. Hegseth asking where he'd like to go for dinner and getting a sneering reply along the lines of "that's exactly the kind of counterfactual question I've come to expect from my wives" (he's on number three).

It's easy to blame the Felon47 regime for this new normal of belligerence. It's accurate to do so, sure, but as with many other aspects of our increasingly dystopian reality, I assign a sizeable share of blame to the American news media. They have accepted and even encouraged the normalizing of this incivility by not calling out the officials who behave in ways that not long ago would have been near-universally unacceptable.

Felon47 has the demeanor of a spoiled toddler, he whines and gripes about anything and everything that doesn't feed his ego, and yet when he abruptly walked out of an interview for Meet the Press last week, hurling insults and demeaning comments to the reporter (female, of course, his favorite sort to insult) and crushing the microphone as he went, that reporter's reaction was to declare that she had since spoken to "the President," excuse his behavior as related to the weather, and come to an agreement to do another interview later on. Epic fail, Meet the Press. Instead, a responsible journalistic follow-up would have been to point out that the things he was upset about being questioned on were more than legitimate topics and that his whiny replies were lies when they were relevant to the topic at all. Treating this sort of thing like it's perfectly acceptable behavior from anyone, let alone someone claiming to be President of the United States, only serves to exacerbate the greater cultural decline into hostility-as-default.

None of this is new info, we've all been living it, it just felt like something I needed to rant about for a few minutes.