Miss Manners' Guide to Massacre Debate Etiquette

Mrs. Alan Greenspan (Andrea Mitchell) is all upset that Donald Trump is using the San Bernardino shooting to boost his candidacy. "Incredibly, his response is poll-driven," she groused to MTP Daily host Chuck Todd on MSNBC last night. "He said, twice, that 'every time there's a tragedy, my poll numbers go up!'"

Of course, she couldn't leave it at that, because whenever Beltway insiders get together for a chat, etiquette dictates that for every right-wing idiot, there has to be a left-wing counter-idiot.Therefore Mitchell went on to complain, "It's just that there's a creepiness going on on both sides, the fact that there was, you know, prayer shaming going on and the bloggers!"

Chuck choked out something like "prayer, for crying out loud, now they're attacking prayer of all things?" National Journal pundit Ron Fournier added that the partisan debate over the San Bernardino massacre has become as radicalized as the shooters themselves. The debate is irresponsible, he said, because both sides are attacking each other while cravenly ignoring the real threat(s). If they were serious adults, they would be bipartisanly selling the fear and the terror that every concerned citizen should be experiencing.

Fournier: He (President Obama) knows where this is headed and he knows his party is headed in the wrong direction ... In a sane political environment, if you have one party doing prayer shaming and another party demonizing and profiling Muslims, they'd be laughed out of politics. They would be marginalized. We wouldn't write about them [crosstalk] We have two very dysfunctional parties and a media now that is not even [crosstalk]

Mitchell: This is not a serious political debate.

Todd: No.

Fournier: It's dangerous.

Both sides do it! There is a serious Permawar going on here, yet Trump is demonizing Muslims for his own gain, and libruls are demonizing prayer for theirs. Oh, the humanity. Oh, the false equivalence.

What Andrea Mitchell ludicrously calls "prayer shaming" is nothing more than calling out politicians who Tweet their maudlin "thoughts and prayers" after every mass shooting, rather than Tweet out their demands for immediate gun control legislation. This has nothing to do with shaming religious people who pray. This has everything to do with exposing hypocrisy.  

Fournier is right that the "debate" has become radicalized. The chattering class is radically stupid and irresponsible for framing everything around partisanship, politics, and the interests of the ruling class in keeping us all afraid, very afraid. While complaining about partisanship trumping (sorry) terror, they're continuously wallowing in partisanship themselves. Heaven forbid that they examine their own alleged consciences for some insight in how they themselves are muddying the "debate" by churning up militaristic fever even as they champion horse-race politics.

The term "prayer shaming" has actually been around for awhile.  The Atlantic ran a piece by Emma Green, suspiciously published immediately after the California shooting. It was as though they had it on file and ready to go. This is obviously what gave Andrea Mitchell her convenient talking points: 

There’s a clear claim being made here, and one with an edge: Democrats care about doing something and taking action while Republicans waste time offering meaningless prayers. These two reactions, policy-making and praying, are portrayed as mutually exclusive, coming from totally contrasting worldviews. Elsewhere on Twitter, full-on prayer shaming set in: Anger about the shooting was turned not toward the perpetrator or perpetrators, whose identities are still unknown, but at those who offered their prayers.

 (snip)

There are many assumptions packed into these attacks on prayer: that all religious people, and specifically Christians, are gun supporters, and vice versa. That people who care about gun control can’t be religious, and if they are, they should keep quiet in the aftermath of yet another heart-wrenching act of violence. At one time in American history, liberals and conservatives shared a language of God, but that’s clearly no longer the case; any invocation of faith is taken as implicit advocacy of right-wing political beliefs.
The most powerful evidence against this backlash toward prayer comes not from the Twitterverse, but from San Bernardino. “Pray for us,” a woman texted her father from inside the Inland Regional Center, while she and her colleagues hid from the gunfire. Outside the building, evacuated workers bowed their heads and held hands. They prayed.

This is missing the point, I think. Nobody is "prayer-shaming" or making fun of religion in these Tweets. As a matter of fact, the prayer-shamer shamers and PC police should also probably alert us to the fact that actual thought-shaming is  going on here, too, since the more secular Thoughts invariably precede Prayers in these hypocritical Tweets. We should know that no alleged prayer can ever sail through the air without first attaching to itself the propaganda rocket booster known as magical thinking.

Actually, there is not much thought or insight of any kind in evidence within the mainstream media. There are, though, lots of buzzwords passing as mentation in an echo chamber, an embarrassment of bromides passing as political courage and will.

I nominate the term "platitude-shaming" to replace prayer-shaming. Or is that too radical?