Don't Be That Guy

That guy, in this case, is Chad Michael Morrisette, who has come up with a hi-larious Halloween display:

A West Hollywood Halloween display showing a likeness of Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin hanging by a noose has caused a furor among some residents who reported it as a hate crime, authorities said Monday.

But Los Angeles County sheriff’s officials said the mannequin sporting a beehive hairdo, glasses and a red coat does not rise to the level of a hate crime because it was part of a Halloween display.

“I’m not defending this; I’m not criticizing it. It doesn’t rise to the level of hate crime,” said Steve Whitmore, spokesman for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, who said he went out to the house himself to look at the display this morning.

“Now, if there was a crime against bad taste . . . ”

[…]

The home’s decorations also feature a doll of John McCain surrounded by decorative flames in the chimney, and other more typical Halloween items, such as skeletons and spider webs.

See? It’s funny because they’re suggesting the metaphorical death of two candidates for president and vice president! Ha!

Chad and crew, come here. Listen. It’s your old pal Jeff here, and I’ve got something to say to you.

QUIT BEING DOUCHEBAGS.

If you want to do a Halloween display with John McCain and Sarah Palin as scary zombies, you could probably make that work. Heck, it would probably be funny. This? This isn’t funny, it’s sick. It’s playing with the notion that it’s okay to kill those we disagree with.

It isn’t. It isn’t even okay to joke about it.

Yes, freedom of speech has to be taken into account here. I’m not sure the police can shut down a political display (though as absolutist a free speech advocate as I am, even I tend to think this crosses the line from speech to threats — which aren’t protected speech). But who cares if the police can shut this down — you should have enough respect for your opponents and your country to, as Barack Obama says, disagree without being disagreeable.

I don’t much care for John McCain or Sarah Palin. I think that if elected, they would be bad for America — the latter more than the former. I think the policies they advocate are reckless, and I think both have shown a dangerous unwillingness to engage in the serious task of policy discussion. But I don’t want them to die. I simply want them to lose next Tuesday. And John can go back to his seven houses and his wife and his Senate seat; Sarah can go back to her tanning bed and the First Dude and her kids. And they can live long and happy lives that don’t involve them running the country.

That’s how our system is supposed to work. Demonizing our opponents, making them out to be inhuman, deserving of death — this is beneath us. And don’t tell me that the Republicans did it first. Two wrongs don’t make a right, and frankly, for all the bile that’s come out on the right, I’ve seen but one image of Obama with a noose — and I was outraged by it, and rightly so.

It’s not less offensive because you put a white woman in the noose — during National Violence Against Women Awareness Month, mind you. The noose may have a special place in Hell for its symbolism in lynching, but there are plenty of women who are brutalized in this country. Intimating violence against Palin ignores that fact, just as intimating violence against McCain ignores the very real violence he’s suffered — and the very real violence men in this country can face.

And both images echo the too-common dark times in our nation’s history, when politicians and activists have been silenced not with the ballot, but with the bullet.

No, this isn’t cute. It isn’t funny. And in its stunning intolerance for the very existence of our opponents, it is anathema to the ideals of the progressive movement. It undermines our civil society. And it marks you, the folks who came up with it, as world class douchebags.

Stop being douchebags. And get off my side.