Jack Kelly Sunday

It's been a while, my friends. So let's get right back into it. Here's a short note on Jack's most recent.

In this week's column at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Jack Kelly does his usual - this time projecting manufactured sins onto "thin-skinned liberals."

With his first rhetorical gesture we know the level of spin:

What a difference an election can make!

Dissent is the highest form of patriotism, we were told by leading liberal pundits and Democratic politicians from Jan. 20, 2001 to Jan. 19, 2009. According to these worthies, there were few more noble ways to express dissent than protest demonstrations, which were frequent during the Bush administration.

Their attitudes have changed since Jan. 20, 2009. Today, some criticism of the president is "borderline sedition," said Time columnist Joe Klein. It could lead to another Oklahoma City bombing, warned former President Bill Clinton.

Huh. No mention of what all those protests were about way back when. The illegal war? The illegal domestic surveillance? The illegal torture? Nope. Jack spins them all to just "dissent and protest demonstrations."

Now what about Klein's "borderline sedition." What's that all about? Recently there's this:



Though you'll note a few things. First he doesn't say "borderline sedition" that comes from this piece at Time.com.

There, Klein was pointing out two United States Republican Senators (Coburn and Inhofe) who prayed for the death or incapacitation of a Democratic Senator in order to derail a vote on Health Care reform as well as this from Coburn:

"The crisis of confidence in this country is now at an apex that has not seen in over 150 years, and that lack of confidence undermines the ability of legitimate governance," he said. "There's a lot of people out there today who...will say, 'I give up on my government,' and rightly so."

Klein explains what he's getting at when he calls it "borderline sedition":

This is borderline sedition. Coburn--who had a friendly relationship with Senator Barack Obama--is saying that giving up on the U.S. government is justified. This helps stoke the hatred of those extremists who see Barack Obama's presidency as illegitimate. It also comes dangerously close to incitement to violence. It certainly deletes Coburn from the list of those who can be considered loyal to the most important American ideals. He should clarify what he means by these statements--and apologize for his hate speech, immediately.

And you'll note that Klein wasn't discussing any criticism of Obama. The sedition Klein was writing about was any attempt to undermine the legitimacy of the government itself.

The more recent sedition quote from Klein said this:

I did a little bit of research just before this show - it's on this little napkin here. I looked up the definition of sedition which is conduct or language inciting rebellion against the authority of the state. And a lot of these statements, especially the ones coming from people like Glenn Beck and to a certain extent Sarah Palin, rub right up close to being seditious.

Thing is, brother Jack must've missed Klein's followup:

On the Chris Mathews Show Sunday, I said that some of the right-wing infotainment gasbags--people like Glenn Beck etc.--were nudging up close to the edge of sedition. This has caused a bit of a self-righteous ruckus on the right. Let me be clear: dissent isn't sedition. Questioning an Administration's policies isn't sedition. But questioning an Administration's legitimacy in a manner intended to undermine or overthrow it certainly is.

Kinda undermines Jack's whole case, don't it?