Disagreement is fine. Debate is fine. Strenuous disagreement and heated debate are both fine. Labelling your opponent a traitor when that manifestly isn’t the case isn’t fine:
Be unkind and blame desperation, or be kind and blame fatigue. Either way, Democrat Alexi Giannoulias’ juvenile pander to Big Labor — his charge that Republican Mark Kirk is guilty of “economic treason” — suggests that he’s too reckless and immature to fill a seat occupied by Everett McKinley Dirksen, Adlai Stevenson III and Barack Obama.
Giannoulias invoked treason, the only crime defined in the Constitution, ostensibly because, a day before a congressional vote on overseas business, Kirk conducted an Internet videoconference fundraiser from the U.S. with a dozen U.S. businesspeople working in Beijing. Note that these are American citizens, not foreign nationals. This is legal — as presidential candidate Obama’s campaign surely knew before it scheduled two 2008 fundraisers with Americans in China.
The amount of xenophobia I’m seeing directed towards China in this election season – from both parties – is seriously disturbing.
It’s not new—rather it’s something that has been building over the last decade or so. I’ve even had a recurring feature here I’ve called “Xenophobia Watch”, mostly anti-Chinese xenophobia.
I recognize that some of my posts could be interpreted as sinophobic, ironic since if anything the opposite is true. I do despise the Chinese regime, though.
Sinophobia has become fashionable and the more prosperous China grows the more that is likely to be the case. It doesn’t help that even junior Chinese officers are blowing off their mouths making anti-U. S. comments. I’m sort of used to a general making an alarmingly anti-U. S. (and delusional) comment every once in a while but when it’s a lieutenant commander or a rank of that level it suggests approval from the political higher-ups.
Thank you for this post. I’m no stranger to hyperbolic – vitriolic – commentary. But I think I appropriately choose the venue.
Alexi was out of control, in that venue.
I’ve thought about this and can’t get outraged about the statement in light of what I think has been a wholly unpleasant campaign from both the candidates. I’m still probably voting for Kirk, but I was on a town hall call with him a week or so ago, and he kept repeating that “I’m a fiscal conservative, social moderate, hawk on national security line” every time he ended a statement. Plastic.