Decorum Lost? From Washington's Rules of Civility to Alinsky's Rules for Radicals.

F-bombs, F-off, BS, MF, Vile Rap Lyrics, Street Thugs in the Hallowed Halls of Congress?

The Father of our Country, in his youth , wrote a book in which he extensively detailed over a hundred rules of manners and courtesy and decorum he thought were necessary for young people to learn and abide by. The book was Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation and one looks at the title, especially the last phrase of it, with a sad realization of how quaintly archaic those words sound in today’s caudron of crudity. Adam Smith said long ago “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation” and we seem to be reaching the maximum limits of that corrosive rot considering the degradation of societal norms of conduct we see all around us, most shockingly in our National Legislature and now even in our formerly staid judiciary.

Here, as if appearing out of the mists of the time which gave birth to the greatest Nation ever created by the mind of man, are a few of President Washington’s rules of decent behavior:

"Speak not evil of the absent, for it is unjust"

"Associate yourself with men of good quality, if you esteem your own reputation; for it is better to be alone than in bad company"

"When a man does all he can though it succeeds not well blame not him that did it"

And, as if written out of a prescient knowledge of what would become the conduct of some of our nation’s lawgivers in our present time, especially a few we will visit later, who are defiling our institutions with garbage behavior and speech:

Let your Conversation be without Malice or Envy, for 'tis a Sign of a Tractable and Commendable Nature: And in all Causes of Passion admit Reason to Govern.

Seeing some of the scenes of street thuggery and vile language these days brings me a certain uneasy sense of Déjà vu as many years ago I was giving seminar lectures on the subjects of civility, courtesy and profesionalism as part of the Louisiana Bar’s Professonalism and Quality of Life program. Yes, to those who might be amazed to hear it, attorneys did spend time learning about those qualities, lawyer jokes notwithstanding, and some of us spent a great deal of time studying them in some depth. As I view some of the antics of the hoodlums we will be discussing here, and writing about them, I realize I am using some of the exact phrases I used lo those many years ago such as “societal and cultural collapse.” It seems that while we have made great strides in many areas in those decades very little has improved in these areas and, worse still, there has been a great deal of deterioration.

Before getting into specifics about incivility in Congress and the Courts recent studies have shown very clearly that lack of courtesy is running rampant through our society today as evidenced by a study published a few months ago by SHRM, a human resources consulting firm:

ALEXANDRIA, Va. – SHRM, the trusted authority on all things work, today released new data from its Civility Index research, revealing incivility has surged since Election Day. The research highlights political viewpoint differences as a key driver, with 56% of U.S. workers citing this as a top contributor to incivility encountered in the workplace.

Key Findings from SHRM’s Q4 Civility Index:

• U.S. workers collectively witnessed or experienced more than 222 million acts of incivility per day in everyday life, another record high for 2024.

• 44% of U.S. workers believe U.S. residents’ ability to be civil toward one another will likely get worse in 2025, citing differences in political viewpoints as driving factors.

• 26% of U.S. workers say they will likely leave their job in the new year because of incivility.

And it is clear that there is a serious problem with this issue in Congress as well as summed up by the title of an article on a study last year: Bringing Decorum Back to the Floor: Why Congress’ Civility Problem Needs Attention. The opening graphic vividly illustrates the problem:

With that background in mind here are just a few -of many!- examples of the rudeness epidemic taking over our governmental leadership; it is most important to note that while this is in my opinion largely coming from the far-left segment of the Democrat Party it is by no means limited to that group.

Here are the main offenders I see as contributing very largely to this problem in no particular order. I would definitely place the recent leaders of both houses of Congress at the head of this parade of horribles as they have both at various times exhibited street thuggery of the lowest order. Who can forget the fine example (s/o) former Speaker Pelosi set at President Trump’s State of the Union address set for her caucus?

In the South we have several ways to describe this kind of common exhibition but -well, civility- inhibits me from using my favorites so I’ll just say this had to go down in history as one of the most cringeworthy moments in Congressional history.

And who can forget the dangerously crude speech by the Majority Leader of the Senate in front of the Supreme Court in which he attacked-by name- two sitting Justices of the Court over the issue of abortion:

While the esteemed Gentleman from Brooklyn denied actually threatening the Justices later (of course; par for the course) when someone tells another that “you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price” it doesn’t take an intellect of the highest order to know what that actually was. Was he held accountable? Are they ever?

But what could possibly say “Rules of Decorum” better than a Member of Congress interrupting a Presidential Address by screaming and howling and waving his cane at the President of the United States as Rep. Al Green of Texas did recently?

It is probably safe to say that this bit of street performance art would have mortified President Washington and one would hope most Presidents thereafter and it is worth noting that Green was censured by his colleagues in the house for his repugnant behavior. However, as hard as it may be to imagine that this could have gotten worse, as I observed in another post entitled Has Our National Legislature Become a Modern Day Bedlam?

As if his disruption of the President’s speech was not gross enough, when called to the well of the House Chamber for a reading of the censure resolution by the Speaker as required by the rules of Congress Green and his fellow Democrats, proving once again how totally impervious they are to learning any constructive lessons, all gathered around Green and proceeded to sing “We Shall Overcome” and got into a shouting match with some Republicans who were trying to assist the Speaker in maintaining order. In other words, the procedure of censure for the disruption was itself disrupted. As trite as it is to say it, you really can’t make this stuff up!

Continuing our “Hit Parade” of fools from some cheap traveling carnival crew no story of this kind could be complete without the raving, distorted, perpetually angry face of TheRight Honourable Maxine Waters of Los Angeles urging her constituents to “get in the faces of” Republicans at gas stations and in restaraunts:

Now the “Gentlelady of California” (don’t you love the strange vernacular Congress uses to describe people they often hate with a passion?) is urging that the most gracious, the most beautiful and certainly one of the most brilliant First Ladies, a naturalized American citizen, be deported for reasons which, like almost everything else this idiot says, are not at all clear (Maxine vs. Melania).:

Just when you think the far-left circus couldn’t get any more clownish, Congresswoman Maxine Waters grabs a mic and reminds us why she’s the poster child for political absurdity. In a bizarre outburst, Waters floated the idea that former First Lady Melania Trump should have been deported—a statement so mindless, it would be laughable if it weren’t so telling. In her desperate attempt to “own” the Trumps, Waters did something utterly unexpected: she accidentally made the strongest case yet for legal immigration done right.

Let’s pause and breathe because the absurdity requires a moment of appreciation. Maxine Waters, a sitting member of Congress for over three decades, actually suggested deporting a legal immigrant—who became a U.S. citizen, married an American citizen, raised an American child, and served this nation with the dignity and grace that the role of First Lady demands.

Before wrapping up this not-at-all uplifting story about the disintegration of our standards of public dialogue in our chambers of government with the “Queen of Ghettospeak” as one witty commenator referred to her recently, a column entitled From Profanity-Chic to Terrorist-Porn by Victor Davis Hanson contains these nuggets of exemplary behavior by our esteemed “leaders”:

In a House ad, Democratic female members mimicked ninjas, kicking and punching at the camera, as if hitting their Republican opponents.

Former vice presidential candidate and Minnesota governor Tim Walz boasts about kicking the “ass” of Republicans.

“Assh*ole” is now the standard Democrat epithet for Musk, as voiced by Sen. Mark Kelly. “D*ck” is the preferred Musk slur from Sen. Tina Smith.

Rep. Jasmine Crockett boasts that Musk “must be taken down.”

She brags she wants to physically assault Sen. Ted Cruz, who “has to be knocked over the head, like hard”—adding “I think you punch, I think you [sic] OK with punching.”

Crockett even mocked disabled and wheelchair-bound Texas governor Greg Abbott: “You all know we got Gov. Hot Wheels down there. … And the only thing hot about him is that he is a hot-ass mess, honey.”

Former Democratic House member and once-censured Rep. Jamaal Bowman claimed Musk was a “Nazi” and an “incompetent thief.”

To be sure that the judiciary is not left out of the grossness sweepstakes, a Judge on the Court of Appeal hearing the Trump Administration’s much reviled (by the lunatic fringe, desperate to keep all the murderous gang members let in by Biden and Mayorkas in our backyard) deportation program actually said at Oral Arguments on this issue that Nazis during WWII were treated better than the poor babies of MS 13 or Tren de Aragua animals are being treated by the administration. That is in my opinion the very definition of soulless incivility.

Finally, to bring down the curtain on this bleak exercise we turn to the very personificaton of the words street ghetto thuggery, Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas, which seems to have more than its fair share of wild creatures in our government.

The author of a post entitled Jasmine Crockett, Queen of Ghettospeak offered this sketch of The Honourable Most Esteemed Gentlelady from Texas; we have had the privilege of visiting the city mentioned in the article and can report firsthand it is highly unlikely “ghettospeak” was ever uttered in those perfectly manicured glades:

Which brings us to Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D, TX) who has been in the news a lot lately, and who has evidently (and apparently correctly) assumed that such shameless pandering, far from offending her constituency, actually resonates with her targeted audiences.

She goes far beyond merely injecting Y’all into her speech whenever possible; she has chosen to affect thoroughly inner-city patterns, tone, rhythm and even vernacular. I can guarantee that her current mode of speaking is not the way she spoke when she was attending the Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School in Ladue, one of St. Louis’s toniest suburbs.

Her “new” manner of speaking is a prime example of the “ghettoization” of America, which is surely not limited to black Americans.

As I said in a recent post entitled Democrats Crash and Burn: Message To Musk: "You musty moo, moo, moo!" :

She has just been the subject of a censure motion in Congress for calling Gov. Greg Abbott “Gov. Hot Wheels”; as we are all aware Gov Abbott is a paraplegic and is wheelchair bound. The soullessness of one who would make such a comment about a person with such a grave disability is, in my opinion, without measure and she has no business being in any position of authority much less the House of Representatives. But there are many more examples of how the party is reaching for the bottom if this is one of their “rising stars” such as her recent stupid comment about what she wanted as a birthday present, a recklessly dangerous statement about violence to Elon Musk:

“On March 29 it’s my birthday, and all I want to see happen on my birthday is for Elon to be taken down,” Crockett said in an event livestreamed last Thursday by a protest group pushing for Tesla owners to sell their cars and people who own Tesla stock to get rid of it.

When asked what she would say if she had an opportunity to speak directly with Elon Musk she replied with a dignfied phrase worthy of Question Time in the House of Commons: “F…off!”

But what prompted me to write this post was seeing a clip of her insane rant in a Congressional Hearing in which she used a word which surely marks a low point in decorum in the House of Representatives; we can only hope it cannot go any lower (b.s. rant at 4:47):

Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, those icons of urban wisdom so admired by the community organizer Barack Hussein Obama and the subject of Hillary Clinton’s senior thesis contains these gems:

1. "Keep the pressure on."

2. "The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself."

3. "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."

Our institutions are being slowly but surely taken over by crass, foul-mouthed bottom-feeders who have no respect for history or tradition and, in some cases, simply have never learned even the basics about our Founding Principles and the foundations laid by our Founding Fathers like The Father of our Country and his Rules of Civility. They are defiling and befouling our Nation in the process. To those who say this is not important in the scheme of the grave problems we are faced with I answer that it is one of the most serious challenges we face today considering that if these values are swept aside in a wave of the kind of street thuggery we see building in our institutions we will no longer have the Republic our Founders bequeathed us.

God Bless America!