Robin Givhan: "The attack on Pelosi graphically highlights just how indecent this country has become"

Nick Anderson's cartoon commentary on the Pelosi attack — and more

Robin Givhan takes a look at one exceptionally disturbing aspect of the attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband Paul: what it says about the growing toleration of seemingly many Americans for elder abuse:

Of all the charges filed against the man who is accused of breaking into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco home and fracturing her husband Paul’s skull with a hammer, the one that is the most jarring is elder abuse.

The attack on Pelosi graphically highlights just how indecent this country has become.

Chitown Kev adds to Givhan's commentary about the growing tolerance, so it seems, for abusive treatment of older people:

I remember that when I heard Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick say that older people should be willing to possibly sacrifice their lives for the country’s economy, I thought that a line was crossed. 

Or the Buffalo police shoving 75 year old Martin Gugino to the ground and having the President of the United States call Mr. Gugino a “provocateur” while defending the actions of the police.

Once certain segments of society find these types of elder abuse as little more than “legitimate political discourse,” what’s off limits?

Will Bunch looks at the surprising (but not surprising, is it?) inability of the media to frame the attack on Nancy and Paul Pelosi for what it is — another manifestation of violence emanating almost exclusively from one side of the political aisle:

The media’s general botching of the Pelosi story comes as arguably this fall’s most timely book — the veteran journalist Margaret Sullivan’s Newsroom Confidential, which is part memoir and part a message to mainstream media colleagues who respect and might actually listen to her — warns that reporters need to adopt a new and less passive tone in confronting today’s profound threats to democracy. Now that she’s out promoting her tome, Sullivan sees a media that this election season largely is not meeting the moment.

“The news media desperately wants to be seen as fair and unbiased and impartial, and, you know, those are good aims,” Sullivan told MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan last week. “But in order to get there, they are overly responsive to criticism from the right and they keep moving over to try to make it seem like they are, you know, are fair — and in fact they’re taking things down the middle that shouldn’t be taken down the middle. You know, democracy and antidemocracy are not equal things and they shouldn’t be treated as such.”

As Margaret Sullivan has just stated in this New York Magazine interview,

My biggest worry is that the American press is not up to this moment that we are experiencing (emphasis added here).

And the white evangelical base of the Republican party, which PRRI has found yet again to be an outlier in its approach to many of the problems now facing American democracy: How is it responding to the attack on Pelosi? If the respose of Southern Baptist leader Rod Martin is any indication, it's not responding well. Mark Wingifeld reports, 

A former officer of the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee [Rod Martin, a Florida entrepreneur] who was among the most outspoken critics of the investigation into sexual abuse in SBC churches has used Twitter to mock the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi. ...

Since Friday, two national news stories have converged almost seamlessly on Martin’s Twitter feed — the attack on Paul Pelosi and Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, where long-established restraints on hate speech were immediately lifted.

The first and most graphic tweet by Martin is an image of a pair of men’s white underwear with a large hammer laid across them. Martin wrote above the image: 'Get it now: the Paul Pelosi Halloween costume!'

The online response to his tweet was immediate and negative. People expressed shock and outrage that Martin, a well-known Christian leader, would engage in such mockery of a violent attack. In response, Martin mocked those who questioned him and blocked them from further response. ...

Meanwhile, just one day before the Pelosi attack, Martin was using Twitter to mock the results of the SBC’s sexual abuse investigation — which he tried to block as an Executive Committee member."

Absolutely disgusting, as far as I'm concerned.