Mitch McConnell

Thanks to intemperate remarks by pundits such as Tom Friedman and Joe Nocera, and to an anonymously sourced item in Politico about Vice President Joe Biden, liberals have been on the defensive about civility following the debt-ceiling debate. It seems that folks like Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby think it’s wrong to call Tea Partiers and right-wing Republicans “terrorists.”

If you want to be offended, be my guest. I agree that it’s uncivil, and frankly I’d much rather call Tea Partiers economic illiterates, which is more descriptive and more accurate. Economists explain.

But now comes Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who, according to the Washington Post, wants us to know that it’s perfectly all right if we want to refer to Republicans as hostage-takers and to crack wise about them shooting their victims. After all, he does. This is amazing:

“I think some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting,” he said. “Most of us didn’t think that. What we did learn is this — it’s a hostage that’s worth ransoming. And it focuses the Congress on something that must be done.”

Ah, yes. You see, McConnell is a moderate Republican, which in 2011 means you hold the hostage for ransom, like civilized folks do. Although he concedes that those who wanted to shoot the hostage have a point, too. After all, he has to keep the caucus together.

You. Can’t. Make. This. Up.

Thursday update: Glenn Beck had some fun with my Guardian column yesterday on Fox News. I don’t believe there’s a publickly available link, but I have posted the relevant excerpt from Lexis-Nexis, along with a retort, in the comments.

• Fewer than half — 41 percent — believe President Obama was born in the United States. Thirty percent flatly declare that Obama was born in another country, and another 29 percent don’t know. In other words, 59 percent of tea-partiers are either hard-core or soft-core birthers.
• Then again, 32 percent of Republicans believe Obama was born in another country.
• Eighteen percent of Americans identify with the tea-party movement, and just one percent of them are black. Not surprisingly, 52 percent of this overwhelmingly white group say that too much is made of the problems facing black people, and one-fourth believe the Obama administration favors blacks over whites.
• Fifty-four percent are Republicans, and 41 percent are independents. Given that 73 percent say they’re conservatives, it stands to reason that most of the independents are politically to the right of where they perceive the Republican Party to be. Just 5 percent say they are Democrats.
• Sixty-four percent believe a flat-out falsehood (other than the birther falsehood): that taxes for most Americans have risen during the Obama presidency. In fact, they have fallen.
• And here’s the explanation: 63 percent say they get most of their news from the Fox News Channel, and large majorities hold favorable view of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin.
• While anger is a prime motivating factor, tea-party “activists” turn out to be even angrier than mere supporters: 72 percent of activists are mad as hell, compared to 53 percent of supporters.

Conclusion: Anyone who thinks the tea-party movement isn’t motivated by racial fears is deluding him- or herself.

I won’t call it racism, but it’s certainly a case of playing on racial fears.

As Barstow makes clear, there is no one single Tea Party organization. Tea Party activism was crucial to Scott Brown’s victory, and neither he nor they (with some exceptions) could be considered extreme.

But Barstow reports that a large segment of the movement is far-right, dedicated to Obama-hatred and conspiracy theories. There may come a time when the Republican Party and Fox News regret egging them on.

By Washington standards, it was a decent turnout, but nothing remarkable. To judge by much of the coverage, though, you would have thought we were witnessing the final collapse of the Obama administration. Fox News covered it like a sporting event, with the tea-party protesters cast as the home team, and the self-loathing mainstream media struggled to follow suit.

Yesterday, a crowd at least that big marched in Washington on behalf of gay and lesbian rights. There has been no reported official estimate, but the New York Times reports that “tens of thousands” marched. So does the Washington Post. The organizers, Equality Across America, have reportedly placed the crowd at 150,000.

Yes, the gay activists got coverage. But even now, the march barely rates a mention on the home pages of CNN.com, MSNBC.com and FoxNews.com. How much do you think we’re going to hear about it in the days and weeks ahead?