Civility: It's a One-Edged Sword

The Financial Times has Simon Schama interview Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post. It's quite fawning. Schama might be angling for a coveted spot in the "Most Obsequious Interviews of 2010" Anthology. I was particularly amused by this bit, discussing Ms. Huffington's support for the Stewart/Colbert Washington Mall rally last month, for which she supplied a fleet of buses:

For Huffington the latest rally was "not just an exercise in point and counterpoint" but "something much bigger": a call to restore the civil society she wants to see replanted in an America polarised between destructively competing demonologies. […] The Huffington Post fleet was a vindication of everything its founder is trying to do to detoxify American politics.
I sometimes read the Huffington Post, so I know that their preferred method for bringing detoxified civility to politics consists of:
  • Deeming Sarah Palin a "patriotic traitor" (along with "Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, the teabaggers, the birthers, and the deathers.")

  • Revealing that "I get happy every time one of you faux-macho shitheads accidentally shoots another one of you in the face." (And, apparently non-ironically, calling Sarah Palin "deranged".)

  • Asking us readers to think of Ann Coulter "as Ophelia with her violetless garlands, crossed with a real fucking hack." (This was a response to Ms. Coulter's column on the death of her father.)

  • Fingering Republicans as "the real enemies". Not to mention the axis of evil.

  • Accusing the Dubya Administration of stealing the 2004 election. (And then calling these successful thieves, somewhat contradictorily, "cretins".)

  • And trashing, in an article by Ms. Huffington herself, Mary Matalin's sins in jewelry, clothes, and makeup. And then revealing that she considered Ms. Matalin to be "nasty". (Also apparently meant to be non-ironic.)

When you're Arianna, civility is for the little people.

(Original link via the Weekly Standard.)