So sad about the "uncivil" left

Look what they reduce our country's poor beleaguered mayors to.  

A Pennsylvania mayor is apologizing for posting Facebook images urging police to "bring the hoses" against protesters and blast them with water cannons, evoking images of the civil rights era.

Karen Peconi is the mayor of Arnold, a suburb of Pittsburgh.

I'm just glad there's nothing to eat in suburban Pennsylvania besides Dairy Queens and bar wings otherwise some very bad people might deprive her of a nice meal or something.  And that, more than anything else, would make the Advocate sad. 

Here in food-centric Louisiana, where the dinner table is the altar of civic and social life, the thought of turning someone away from a meal seems especially off-key. That’s what happened Friday night when President Donald Trump’s press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, was asked to leave a Washington, D.C. area restaurant by the owner, who dislikes the president’s policies.

Okay let's stop right there for a sec because the anonymous troll who writes these editorials is already leaving some important facts out.  To begin with, the restaurant owner quietly and asked Sanders to leave after having asked her employees whether or not they felt comfortable serving her. They voted no. Rather than force them to work under morally compromising conditions, she respected their decision.

The Advocate erases the staff entirely and assigns all agency to the owner who they say "dislikes president's polices."  The editorialist(s) deliberately obscure(s) circumstances here because it is his/her/their intent to diminish the actual reasons for the restaurant staff's differences with the Trump Administration in the first place. Rather than name the abhorrent "Zero Tolerance" immigration brutality that has been ripping families apart and placing them into camps, the Advocate troll(s) merely say(s) "The president and his politics are deeply controversial." They then go on to lament the damper this has put on their ability to enjoy their own charmed little lives.

But in Louisiana, we know perhaps more than most about the value of breaking bread with friends — and even adversaries. It’s a way to affirm our basic humanity amid sometimes painful differences.

Imagine wanting to "break bread with" and "affirm the basic humanity" of someone who is systematically locking thousands of humans up in cages. Most of us can't do that.  The reason the Advocate can, though, is because staying within the relative good graces of the monsters who rule us is essential to the success of any commercial media operation. And a favorite means to this is  negating legitimate anti-establishment criticism by way of the "civility" trope. A recent episode of the Citations Needed podcast explored this rather thoroughly. This is from the episode description.

Mean words or questioning motives are signs of declining civility and the subject of much lament from our media class. However, op-eds explicitly advocating war, invasion, sanctions, sabotage, bombing and occupation or cutting vital programs and lifelines for the poor are just the cost of doing business. What’s rhetorically out of bounds - and what isn’t - is far more a product of power than any objective sense of "civility" or “decency.”

The norms fetishists at the Advocate are sufficiently isolated from the real consequences of the politics they are paid to report on that they can afford to chummily "break bread with friends -- even with adversaries," as they say in their op-ed.  Their professional culture incentivizes flattering politicians and the donor class. By necessity it also minimizes empathy with their victims.

This is why they can pretend the unpleasantness that characterized this year's legislative sessions was a mere matter the governor and Republican leaders not getting together over a plate of catfish.  Louisiana residents who depend on medicaid and SNAP funds for their survival may find this metaphor obscene if not downright uncivil.