Louder than Bombs

I'm trying to take a break from outrage, call it a fast if you will.  But it's not easy. There's a lot that I could rage about from my progressive cocoon, but in my experience those who do not share my particular socio-political slant will instantly write it off as sour grapes or liberal whining.  So I'm going to address something that we as a society need to understand better no matter what side of the political spectrum you happen to inhabit.  The only position that need not care about this is the one occupied by blatant authoritarians, fascists, dictators or totalitarians and their supporters.
I have talked about this before, and on the surface it sounds sort of geeky-wonkish, but it is absolutely not.  In fact, the study and practice of this particular field will help you succeed in almost any venture that requires you to regularly speak or otherwise communicate with other human beings with whom you do not share a hive mind.  I am speaking, of course, about rhetoric. Once taught as a core subject to school children and continually refined throughout the educational process, rhetoric is now becoming a lost art.  In fact, instead of being understood as "the art of speaking or writing effectively," rhetoric is sometimes seen as the use of deliberately obtuse language to try and bully through a point.
The art of rhetoric though has certain conventions that are supposed to peel us away from that specific tendency.  Rules of rhetoric and argument are crucial in basic human interaction, and since we no longer study them as a matter of course, these important things, which should not be forgotten, are often bull-rushed right into the mud. What happened to Elizabeth Warren yesterday, and continuing into today is a miscarriage of the very rules meant to protect our public discourse from the brute rule of the majority, which next to the rise of a despot or a monarch of some sort, was the second biggest fear of those who framed our nation's republic.
Here's what happened:

1. Elizabeth Warren intended to read a letter from Coretta Scott King (the widow of MLK) that had been entered into the record during hearings about Jeff Sessions (current Trump nominee for Attorney General of the United states) back in 1986 when Sessions was a candidate for a federal judicial appointment in Alabama.  King wrote that, "Sessions has used the awesome power of his office in a shabby attempt to intimidate and frighten elderly black voters." The letter was written to then Senator Strom Thurmond (hmmm), who never entered it into the official record (wonder why?). Sessions was not confirmed despite the apparent attempt to silence the influential voice of King.
2. Mitch McConnell invoked a rule in the Senate against impugning the character of other Senators.  Which is a good rule to have, it abides by the rhetorical principal of avoiding ad-hominem attacks.  For instance, if I were to refer to McConnell as turtle-man, that would be an ad-hominem attack.  If I were to say that Senator McConnell misused the rules of discourse to silence Senator Warren and the late Mrs. King, it would not be.  The latter statement is an assessment of his behavior and lack of situational understanding.
3. The Senate then voted to officially revoke Senator Warren's voice in the remainder of the Sessions confirmation proceeding, because she broke a rule, which she absolutely did not break.  Here's why: If she and Sessions had been arguing about a piece of legislation on the floor of the Senate, and she brought out King's letter to discredit him and his argument, then she absolutely would have been guilty and would deserve the motion to silence her.  However, the issue being examined here is precisely the character of Senator Sessions and his relative fitness or unfitness for the office of Attorney General.  In such an instance, previous character assessments are absolutely relevant.
4. Liz Warren, being no one to be trifled with, proceeded to read the letter outside the Senate chambers and post the video to social media. Getting her message out there and blasting egg on to the faces of the Republicans who shut her up. Parenthetically, it made me ache for the possibility of the Sanders/Warren ticket that could have been if the DNC did not have their heads so far up... sorry I'm trying not to outrage.
5. Hours later, the frenzy was such that when Senator Jeff Merkley decided to read other parts of the ten page letter, there was no opposition voiced.  In other words they knew how bad this was shaping up to look.  But by allowing a male Senator to read from a document that they had basically censured a female Senator for trying to use they added a bit of sexist slime to the already copious amounts of improper procedural bullying they had smeared in their eye.

This is bad stuff, bad for Republicans and Democrats alike. This is the breakdown of civil discourse precipitated by a relatively small controversy.  It is the type of controversy that has been pushed upon us pretty much daily by the Trump administration.  He has picked, what seem like deliberately inflammatory people for his cabinet: Devos, Sessions and Pruitt being at the top of the list, but even some of the more conventional picks like Tillerson are not without eyebrow raising features.  Right now the dysfunction in the Senate is the latest manifestation of the chaos that is reigning in our government.  The railing and raging of people like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren is not enough to stop it, and may even be contributing to it. However, it is not the responsibility of the dissenting position to silence themselves in order to make things go smoother for the majority.  Right now the Democrats have no card to play but the hope that the checks and balances of our system of government can somehow function. If those checks and balances fail, i.e. if the Republican controlled legislature fails to hold their President to account for his chaos dealing and/or incompetence, and if the courts are overridden or politically cowed, our Republic will fall, and that is not hyperbole.