Good manners.
Paul Krugman: It's fair to be uncivil when liberty is at stake (tags)
'One of the problems with media coverage of this administration," wrote Eric Alterman in The Nation, "is that it requires bad manners." He's right. There's no nice way to explain how the Bush administration uses cooked numbers to sell its tax cuts, or how its arrogance and gullibility led to the current mess in Iraq. So it was predictable that the administration and its allies, no longer very successful at claiming that questioning the president is unpatriotic, would use appeals to good manners as a way to silence critics. Not, mind you, that Emily Post, the doyenne of etiquette, has taken over the Republican Party: The same people who denounce liberal incivility continue to impugn the motives of their opponents.