A Case of Shame On Everyone?

I tweeted earlier today a video clip of Jimmy Hoffa Jr. It was the very first one that came across my Twitter feed. Here it is: Note – sorry I couldn’t get wordpress to like the embed code. You’ll have to follow the link, but I wanted to use the original clip I posted on Twitter.

http://bigjournalism.com/pjsalvatore/2011/09/05/union-boss-intros-obama-in-detroit-threatens-tea-party-lets-take-these-sons-of-bitches-out/

So apparently FOX News did its usual thing and put as much spin as they could on this clip. They cut off the previous sentence to make it seem more “violent” according to mediamatters.org.

Now I posted the video knowing full well Mr. Hoffa wasn’t intending to tell people to go out and murder or maim any of the GOP politicians, even without the previous sentence. My point in posting it is that on both sides we seem to have forgotten our promise not to use the violent metaphors in regards to politicians. This is not to mean that you aren’t free to use them, but out of respect for Representative Giffords we were going to find other ways to phrase political and election disagreements.

The right wing media has already countered the editing job by pointing out more of Hoffa’s speech and its war metaphors.

So here’s the difficult question – what do we do? It seems that the “battle” metaphor is often appropriate in politics. So can we perhaps just make an effort to tone it down and be mindful of our speech. I think in this case Mr. Hoffa went over the line by saying “take these son of a bitches out.” Use the battle and war metaphors, but when it gets to the point of talking about the actual people, how about being more specific and saying we are going to use our votes and take charge or something similar. Let’s not leave any question in anyone’s mind as to what we mean when we say we are going to “take someone out.”

So shame on FOX News. And shame on Mr. Hoffa. I’d hope they would both apologize. I know neither will.