Marathon Pundit: There will be blood: What happened to civility?

Thursday, December 13, 2012

There will be blood: What happened to civility?

If you receive your news from the mainstream media, then you don't know about the union thuggery and the left-wing inflammatory rhetoric that occurred in Lansing, Michigan during protests over the state's decision to enact right-to-work legislation.

What happened to civility?

From Rich Lowery in Politico:

State Rep. Douglas Geiss achieved his 15 minutes of notoriety by taking to the floor of the Michigan Legislature to warn "there will be blood" in response to the right-to-work law. He couched his prediction in terms of past corporate-union conflicts, namely the Battle of the Overpass in 1937, when Ford Motor Co. toughs assaulted United Auto Workers organizers.

But why would Michigan companies want to beat anyone up over a right-to-work law? Come to think of it, why would anyone consider a law allowing people hired at a unionized shop to decide freely whether or not to join a union an incitement to violence? No one is forced to join the Rotary Club, yet Rotarians peaceably go their way without any bloodshed.

Outside the Michigan Capitol, as the right-to-work law was debated, union protesters tore down the large organizational tent of the pro-right-to-work free-market group Americans for Prosperity and punched Fox News contributor Steven Crowder. This wasn't exactly the Battle of the Overpass, when Walter Reuther got kicked down flights of stairs. Crowder sustained a chipped tooth and small cut on his forehead. But it was notable who was doing the punching.

At least it should have been. Some on the left have condemned Crowder for having the temerity to get assaulted (or as Stephen Douglas said of Charles Sumner before he was caned by Preston Brooks: "That damn fool will get himself killed by some other damn fool."). A writer at Gawker argued, in effect, that it was really stupid of Crowder to get in the way of a mob involved in the good, clean work of trashing other people's property.