by Theodore Douglas

Created on: September 04, 2009   Last Updated: September 05, 2009

Turn on the television, radio, or survey the multitude of political blogs out there and it seems there's little other than outrage out there today. What happened to civility in America? What happened to informed debate?

Politics has always been a dirty game. Back in 1804, when founding fathers Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr had a spat, they settled things like gentlemen-by having a duel. Hamilton lost. When Franklin Roosevelt ran for president in 1932, some Republicans whispered that polio had compromised not just his body but also his mind. Historically, civility has always been in the eyes of the beholder.

No, politicians don't duel to protect their honor anymore, but that would be preferable to rhetorically dragging one's opponent into the gutter whenever a debate occurs. Thanks to the proliferation of news sources, it has become easier to attack the character of an opponent rather than argue the pros and cons of whatever issue underlines the argument. Why? Welcome to the age of the sound bite.

Long ago, the New York Times would print political speeches and let their readers decide. Now we, and yes, we are all complicit in this, want knowledge compressed into sentences or phrases that, in theory, capture the essence of the issue. We're too busy for anything more, we tell ourselves.

Why then do we come away from reading the news with an empty feeling inside? Our desire for brevity has killed political debate. At the one extreme, we have Obama's 2008 slogan, "Change we can believe in." What's there to argue with? It's so much better than change I'm morally opposed to.

For another example, take Fox News' famous "Fair and Balanced" promise. So, Fox News isn't going to be opinionated. Isn't that what we used to expect from our news sources?

If we're only throwing vacuous phrases around, how could we have fallen into the politics of outrage? This is why we have to consider the other extreme. There we have phrases charged with a clear, derogatory, meaning. During the recent health care debate, Sarah Palin spoke of a potential Obama "death panel" deciding who received care. The phrase has a meaning as disturbing as it is misleading. But if that were all you knew, it would be hard to favor the administration's heath care proposals.

This type of rhetoric has rolled out the red carpet for the politics of outrage. Democrats accuse opponents of being right-wing extremists (and extremist is a term linked with terrorism), while Republicans call their adversaries socialists

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