Can't We All Just Get Along?

Quoting Peggy Noonan's column today:

"Campbell Brown of CNN did nothing wrong for instance in pressing a campaign spokesman on Palin's foreign policy credentials. She was unjustly criticized for following an appropriate and necessary line of inquiry. But endless front page stories connected to Mrs. Palin's 17-year-old daughter? Cable news shows that had people insinuating Palin, whom America had not yet even met, was a bad mother, and that used her daughter's circumstances to examine Republican views on abstinence education? That was ugly.

In the end it made Palin the underdog, and gave her the perfect platform for the perfect dive she made Wednesday night.

We have had these old press fights in the past – they were a source of constant tension when I was a child, when Barry Goldwater came forward as a conservative and the press scorned him as a flake, and later when Ronald Reagan came up and the press dismissed him as Bonzo.

But this latest fight commences on a new and wilder battlefield. The old combatants were old school gentlemen, Eric Sevareid and Walter Cronkite; the new combatants are half-crazy cable anchors, the lower lurkers of the Internet, and the anonymous posters on the comment thread on the radical website.

This new war on new turf is not good, and carries the potential of great harm. Everyone really ought to stop, breathe deep, and think.

I am worried they won't. A friend IM'd the day after Palin's speech, and I told him of an inexplicable sense of foreboding. He surprised me by saying he shared it. "Calling all underworlds reporting for duty!," he wrote. "The bed is about to fly around the room, the puke is about to come out." He meant: this campaign is going to engage unseen powers and forces. He meant: this campaign, this beautiful golden thing with two admirable men at the top and two admirable vice presidential candidates, is going to turn dark."

After Noonan's open mic gaffe this week, I figured she would have to tread carefully into Palin territory. Gifter writer that she is, she did. And I like the point of this quote. Stop. Take a breath.

We've been going at it pretty good on this blog on some of the comments and I love that. I love the productive debate. I think it informs us all. I know that when one chooses to enter politics then basically you are volunteering yourself and your family to be flayed, salted, abused, tortured, examined, poked, and prodded. It's part of the game. But stop. And think. We have been respectful and fair on this site, I think, for the most part. But I think that some of the things said about Palin, about McCain, about Obama, about Michelle, in the media have been mean. Hateful mean. When Randi Rhodes said on her program tonight that Palin should "just stay home and raise her retarded baby" that just crosses a line.

I'm in agreement with Ms. Noonan. We need to be real careful here as this campaign continues. Politics is politics, but hate is hate. And I don't do hate.