America Sees the Real Obama, Angry Agitator

“Open hearts. Open minds. Fair-minded words.”Remember these words? They’re the president’s words, from his 2009 speech at Notre Dame University calling for opponents and proponents of abortion to just get along.But that’s all out the window now. This week an angry president angrily denounced the National Rifle Association and Second Amendment protectors. He called them liars after an unconstitutional gun control bill suffered a stinging defeat in the U.S. Senate this week.So it is apparent the president never was serious about staying above the fray and setting a tone of civil discourse. That was all just talk, just typical rhetoric.We saw the real Obama, flaring anger, doing what comes natural to him: agitating. The pretense of civility is over.And don’t bet the farm on the University of Arizona’s National Institute for Civil Discourse ever mentioning the president’s insolence and incivility. It’s never mentioned any of his uncivil remarks, noteven his labeling of opponents as “enemies.” Nor his racist remarks about his white grandmother.It’s obvious Obama, Democrats in general, and their rage-aholic friends at MSNBC are insulated against any attention from the National Institute for Civil Discourse.We visited the institute's website this week to see what it's up to. The most recent news there is the winning entries in the National Institute for Civil Discourse’s essay contests.One of the two winners is author Stephen D. Konieczka, Ph.D., educator and researcher at the University of Colorado. Dr. Konieczka’s work focuses on socio-cultural talk and discourses of democratic governance, participatory politics, and community development. His winning essay is titled "The Armory as Argument: Cultural Communication Practices and the (Dangerous) Prospects for Civil Discourse about Gun Violence in the U.S." Here's an entry from that essay:"Having defined communicative aggression and at least one alternative,27 the second task is to identify contexts where aggressive communication is the norm in everyday interaction. The list of situations where aggressive communication is valued in U.S. culture is perhaps endless; from “trash talk” on the field to slanders outside the women’s health clinic, words that devalue other people are all to common within institutions and systems in which individuals are organized and related. Perhaps the most important contexts in which aggressive communication is today celebrated is the olitical and/or governmental sphere (including reporting thereof). U.S. politics has never been a civil sport, but over the last 20 years or so, it appears to have increasingly little room for reasoned, responsible, and respectful argument. The media personality Tucker Carlson has best evidenced the perceived value of aggression in U.S. politics, declaring in 2007 that then Senator Obama “sound[ed] like a pothead” when the presidential candidate opined that “we have lost the capacity to recognize ourselves in each other . . . [producing] an empathy deficit."Notice there is no mention of the radical leftists who daily spew anger and hate at conservatives and Christians on MSNBC and other shrill left-stream media outlets.There is no mention of tho radicals who shouted down opponents of the City of Phoenix’s bathroom bill trying to speak at a public hearing earlier this year.Konieczka takes an accusatory swing at gun owners and de-legitimizes gun ownership as a means of self defense.He unfairly attacks peaceful pro-life witnesses at abortion factories as "slanderers."He nitpicks on a conservative statement by Tucker Carlson while refusing to pick from any of the hundreds of hateful remarks by Ed Schultz and Chris Matthews, not to mention  the countless hateful remarks from many on the Left.Clearly the NICD is endorsing this biased writing -- celebrating it with an uncritical eye.The NICD is dominated by left-wingers like honorary co-chairman Bill Clinton and others. It is window dressing, serving no useful purpose. In its two years, it has refused to call out any real practitioners of uncivil discourse.