I liked Charlie Kirk when I saw his YouTube videos of his format that any topic is up for discussion at meetings with college students, at one of which he was assassinated Wednesday. I liked when he took up Feminists who couldn’t say what a woman was and he took up Hamas supporters who were very ill informed. I didn’t agree with him when he was out of his depth and didn’t see the difference between Soviet Communism and Socialism. Maybe he should have finished his undergraduate education. An autodidact will have a lot of holes in his education. But many educated people also think they know more than they do, including me.
What I liked best about him was the manner and content of his discussion with students. He was pointed, humorous and, most important, never tried to demean his interlocators, only to make a shambles of their intellectual positions. He was respectful, just the way a debater is supposed to be, which is not what political advocates and especially politicians do not do.
There were two immediate standard responses on the news of his death. David Axelrod said that both sides should draw back and consider carefully their remarks so that people recognize that they are human beings rather than just partisan advocates. Elizabeth Warren provided a different take. She said that Trump should be blamed for having fomented violence, and there is some truth in that in that Trump is notorious for villainizing and personalizing his opponents ever since he appeared in 2016 presidential debates and talked about sleepy Jeb and little Marco. So the Republicans are more the offenders to decorum in politics rather than equal offenders with Democrats. I remember when Jesse Jackson during a Presidential Primary Debate in 1984 confronted Phil Donahue, a talk show host trying to play moderator, who was being sarcastic. Jackson said all of these candidates deserved respect. It was a grandstand gesture to answer a grandstand attack but still deserves notice as the honorable custom for how people for high office should be treated.
Oh yes. There was the trucker who said on the evening of te assassination, “This is war”, disregarding or even not knowing that two Democratic Minnesota state senators had been shot in their home a few months ago. If this is war, like the movie “Civil War”, then you are entitled to kill the President or a trucker, and we haven’t come to that. In fact, the anti-Trump people have showed remarkable forebearance. They have not accused the newscast Trumpites of being in the league of insurrectionists, as all supporters of Trump were, as there is plenty of evidence of that from the Jan. 6th investigation and the tape ofTrump trying to fix the vote in Georgia. Trump nor his allies have ever offered an explanation of those matters and the rest of us have let go because the judicial system was too slow to bring Trump to court..
Cable news commentators on MSNBC are also violative of political decorum. They go after the persons rather than their positions. Lawrence O’Donnell showed the video of hair dye streaking down Rudolph Guiliani’s cheeks so as to defame him. MSNBC shows Trump to be having intestinal difficulties, the back of his pants stained. More undignified for the ones who present these facts than the ones in physical distress. Remember that photographers did not take pictures of FDR in a wheelchair though later on when addressing Congress about the Yalta meeting he said he would have to sit because carrying around a lot of iron was tiring. We had come a long way to when the Miami Herald broke the story of Gary Hart dallying with Donna Rice in 1988, dooming his Presidential nomination or Ken Starr trying to doom Clinton’s Presidency because of Clinton’s liaison, hardly an affair, with Monica Lewinsky. Nor do I care about connecting Trump to Jeffrey Epstein. There are bigger fish to fry, such as cancelling USAID so that food packets for malnourished children in Africa will not be distributed to them.
So we lost in Charlie Kirk a model of decorum even if his President, his principal, does not exemplify that.