Is this that "new civility" we've been hearing about?

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That took a lot longer than expected. Two and half weeks after the President's revealing statist-centric "You didn't build that" comments, supporters of the President are responding to his critics with... well, you tell us.

Here's Jonathan Chait:

Mitt Romney’s plan of blatantly lying about President Obama’s “you didn’t build that” speech is clearly drawing blood. But what makes the attack work so well is not so much the lie itself but the broader subtext of it.

The key thing is that Obama is angry, and he’s talking not in his normal voice but in a “black dialect.” This strikes at the core of Obama’s entire political identity: a soft-spoken, reasonable African-American with a Kansas accent. From the moment he stepped onto the national stage, Obama’s deepest political fear was being seen as a “traditional” black politician, one who was demanding redistribution from white America on behalf of his fellow African-Americans.

Speaking in a "black dialect"? Harry Reid would be so disappointed.



The President wandered off the teleprompter reservation, spoke what is truly in his heart, he was called out on it and now for doing so, those critics are accused of suddenly remembering he is a "traditional" black politician.



Leslie at Temple of Mut uses this graphic from The Princess Bride to sum up perfectly our feelings on the left's knee jerk reacton to criticisms of the President's policies

We guess we shouldn't be surprised but we are so often caught off guard by the level of vitrol and, well, hatred that is leveled at conservatives and libertatrians for holding views that have not been vetted by the political class.



Totally related to the blow-back from "You Didn't Build That" criticism, here's KT at the Scratching Post opining on the Chick-fil-A/gay marriage dust-up in a post titled The People You Hate Aren't Here:

I'm a Eucharistic Minister at our church. Last Sunday while distributing the Body of Christ, a couple of women who were almost certainly lesbians came up to receive the Host. They were given the Sacrament with as much love as everyone else. That happens all the time and the meaning of the action is totally lost on the progressives who long to hate us.

In Catholicism, there is nothing that compares to the Body and Blood of Christ. Nothing even comes close. Because we oppose gay marriage, we're frequently accused of hating gays. We don't. Not even a little. If we did, how could we share our most sacred thing with them? When we distribute Communion, it doesn't come with a lecture to each person or even a stern look. It comes with love and solemnity, not hate. Come and see who we are and you'll understand.

We believe in the traditional definition of marriage but if we were asked to vote on a Prop. 8-like measure again, we would most likely abstain from voting. Our own "evolved" thinking is that the government should not be in the business of dictating the terms of a sacred vow that is taken before God and man.

Besides, we'll cop to not really having the stomach for it. Our traditional marriage belief is not strong enough for possibly inviting being a target for the hatred and scorn we have seen heeped upon the Chick-fil-A organization for doing nothing visibly beyond serving fried chicken in neighborhoods across this country.

Instead, we have an atmosphere out there that is so toxic, the left is just this short of issuing scorecards to judge the political suitability of private enterprises its followers may wish to do business.

And this toxicness has now become so one-sided it had emboldened elected officials to act not as stewards of the rule of law in a constitutional republic rather as commissars in a totalitarian state. This is the most troubling aspect of all this: beliefs outside that which has been officially sanctioned by the ruling class are effectively criminalized.

A Republic if you can keep it, indeed.