"If you put a gun to their head and they had to choose between one or the other..."

"... they'd pay the higher taxes without a peep. That's because, on the level of raw power, they know how the world works."

That's Kevin Drum in Mother Jones on January 22, providing an egregious example of the left using violent gun imagery to make a political point, even after the Tucson massacre and all those calls for new civility. I found that via Matt Yglesias, who quotes Drum and even puts the gun-to-the-head business in boldface but takes absolutely zero note of the extremely violent rhetoric.

"The fifth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that concern with ethics increases with the number of means available and vice versa."

Wrote Saul Alinsky in "Rules for Radicals." I went searching for that rule when I read the way Kevin Drum and Mark Schmitt pushed back against Spencer Ackerman. But Alinsky was at least contemplating the role of ethics as he subordinated means to ends:

Reviewing and selecting available means is done on a straight utilitarian basis — will it work? Moral questions may enter when one chooses among equally effective alternate means. But if one lacks the luxury of a choice and is possessed of only one means, then the ethical question will never arise; automatically the lone means becomes endowed with moral spirit.

(Page 32.)

We don't have the full text of what Drum and Schmitt wrote. But in The Daily Caller quotes, they only ask what will work best. They don't even throw in as a makeweight argument that it would be more ethical to refrain from calling their opponents racists.

***

Another distinction is that Alinsky was talking about rules for political activists, not journalists. Even as means are subordinated to ends, journalism is subordinated to political activism.

How far were Journolisters willing to go to help Obama win the election?

Jonathan Strong, at the Daily Caller, quotes from that email list known as the Journolist:

Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”

Michael Tomasky, a writer for the Guardian, also tried to rally his fellow members of Journolist: “Listen folks–in my opinion, we all have to do what we can to kill ABC..."

Kill ABC because in an ABC News debate, Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos had pressed Obama with questions about Wright.

"...and this idiocy in whatever venues we have. This isn’t about defending Obama. This is about how the [mainstream media] kills any chance of discourse that actually serves the people.”

Interesting double use of the word "kill." We need to kill ABC before ABC kills the discourse.

“We need to throw chairs now, try as hard as we can to get the call next time. Otherwise the questions in October will be exactly like this. This is just a disease.”

Throw chairs now. Kill. Rather violent ideation there. Imagine if a tea partier had used such language. Look at what Spencer Ackerman wrote:

"I do not endorse a Popular Front, nor do I think you need to. It’s not necessary to jump to Wright-qua-Wright’s defense. What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.

"And I think this threads the needle. If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction."

Smash... through a plate-glass window... snapshot of the bleeding mess... live in a state of constant fear...

Ackerman got some pushback, but only, it seems, because his strategy appeared ineffective. Mark Schmitt thought it would be bad to make the campaign "all about character" (as opposed to substance), and Kevin Drum said that it would be counterproductive because "the Obama brand" was about being above it all.

The Daily Caller may be picking the juiciest bits from the prize archive it has acquired. I would like access to the whole set of documents so that I can see for myself. The liberal/lefty journalists were eager to help their side, and perhaps conservative journalists do the same for their side. Is Strong smashing Ackerman's head through a plate glass window — rhetorically! — or is this an admirable study of ethics in journalism?

What would be different about the health care debate today if Hillary Clinton, not Barack Obama, had become President?

Kevin Drum says:

Yesterday Paul Krugman reminded us that preferring Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton because you wanted to avoid the Clinton psychodrama of the 90s was always a vain hope. Back in early 2008 he wrote, "Any Democrat who makes it to the White House can expect the same treatment: an unending procession of wild charges and fake scandals, dutifully given credence by major media organizations that somehow can’t bring themselves to declare the accusations unequivocally false." Ezra Klein, chatting online about town hall hysteria, added, "This is how the conservative movement organizes against major pieces of liberal legislation. It's not about a particular moment or leader."

This is unquestionably true, but I'd just like to add one thing. If Hillary Clinton had won last year's Democratic primary and gone on to become president, and then this year's town hall meeting had turned into insane gatherings of lunatics yelling about death panels, every single pundit in Washington — Every. Single. One. — would be blaming it on her. Their unanimous take would be: Democrats knew that she was a divisive figure and chose to put her in the White House anyway. It's hardly any wonder that conservatives have gone nuts, is it?

That narrative, as we now know, would have been 100% wrong. But that would have been the narrative anyway. Caveat lector.

This is all very interesting, but I'd just like to add one thing. Unlike Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama presented himself as someone who could bring us into a new era of transcendence over partisan differences. There would be Hope and Change. Obama believed — and a lot of us believed — that he was a calm, reassuring figure whom we could all love and trust.

Hillary would have known better. She'd been through it all before. She wouldn't have thought she could could ease you and cool you and cease the pain*. She wouldn't have blithely assumed Americans would quietly accept the vast, complex restructuring of health care that the congressional Democrats dumped on us. Obama naively thought that he was enough, and the more-liberal-than-America Democrats imagined they could get by on the magic of our admiration for the charming new President, who would look even lovelier as he amassed glittering accomplishments. Wouldn't he be wonderful? Wouldn't America be wonderful to have elected such a fine man President?

He and they got all puffed up. I don't think Hillary would have let that happen. He was Hope. She was Experience. Experience would have been different.