In an opinion column this week in the conservative Wall Street Journal, author John Steele Gordon reassures readers that, despite the debate that's been sparked by the Arizona shooting, there's absolutely nothing wrong, or out of the ordinary, with today's political rhetoric.

Headline:

If You Can't Stand the Heat....;

Harry Truman would have little patience for the notion that caustic political rhetoric causes murder.

Gordon's claim is that the current fuss about rhetoric and whether it's become too hateful, extreme and dangerous is just a waste because our political discourse has always been like this:

Has the nation's political climate actually gotten worse in the last two years, when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the White House? Of course not.

Interesting.

And so what does Gordon then conveniently fail to do? He conveniently fails to quote any right-wing hate rhetoric that so many observers find objectionable and dangerous. Gordon provides no examples of the sewage that spews from programs like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck or the Fox News schedule. Gordon says there's nothing different about today's political rhetoric and to prove it, he quotes none of it.

Brilliant.

What Gordon won't even address is that there's a massive, closely coordinated, multi-million dollar campaign by the right wing media to destroy the Obama presidency. The campaign's been up and running for 100 weeks now. (Somehow, Gordon missed it.) And the campaign's agreed-upon strategy is to try (unsuccessfully) to destroy the Obama presidency by using the type of hateful, paranoid, insurrectionist and yes, borderline revolutionary rhetoric that has never before been seen or heard on a daily basis within the mainstream media. And unequivocally, it has never been seen or heard in modern day American politics.

But here comes along Gordon to tell everyone to just calm down, there's nothing unusual in play today, and that American politics has always been rough and tumble. To prove that, he starts flipping through history books to prove how rhetoric in the past was just as bad as the rhetoric of today. (Y'know, the rhetoric from today that he refuses to quote) [emphasis added]:

Even George Washington, twice unanimously elected to the presidency, found himself slandered in the press. The Philadelphia Aurora, the leading Jeffersonian paper, referred to him sarcastically as “Saint Washington,” accused him of overdrawing his salary, and compared him to Nero and “a common pickpocket.” By the end of his second term, Washington, like Johnson 160 years later, was desperately tired of being “buffeted in the public prints by a set of infamous scribblers.”

Thomas Jefferson in his term was regularly accused of fathering children by his slave Sarah Hemmings, often described in the papers as “dusky Sally.” (Recent DNA evidence, in fact, gives considerable credence to the accusation. But in Jefferson's day, there was no evidence beyond gossip.)

Andrew Jackson was regularly called “King Andrew” and accused of seeking to establish a monarchy.

This really is one of my pet peeves. It's this hollow and lazy argument that today's far-right rhetoric that floods the mass media via television, radio and the Internet, and that routinely depicts the president of the United States as a racist, and aNazi, and a socialist tyrant intent on stripping away America's freedoms, is just like when some penny daily in the 1800's printed an editorial cartoon that said something mean about Thomas Jefferson, or mocked Andrew Jackson.

The situations are exactly alike, so what's everybody upset about? And since this is all very old news, of course there's no reason to reflect on today's murderous political culture and the vile attacks that spew out of the GOP Noise Machine because we've seen this all before. It's good. It's healthy. It's American.

Bullshit.

There's nothing American about depicting the President of the United States as an enemy of the state who is trying to drive up unemployment on purpose. There's nothing American about using mass media to scare the hell out of people withfanatical, paranoid claims that their tyrannical government is bent on destroying liberties and crushing dissent.

This is just purposefully dumb, revisionist stuff disguised as a history lesson, and people like Gordon embarrass themselves by playing dumb on such a Herculean scale.