". . . The country needs the remaining (if dwindling) opinion leaders from institutions like the military, churches, universities, foundations, business, the media, and public life to outspokenly denounce those who profit from bombast and lies and to denounce equally the television and radio networks and the print outlets that gave them airtime and web and print space, with the legitimacy that flows from them. There's no better place to start than with the outrageous rhetoric of Stephen Schwarzman, billionaire chairman of the Blackstone Group, who responded to a proposal from the Obama administration to treat the "carried interest" of private equity managers as ordinary income, taxable at a rate of 35 percent, instead of the same as capital gains and dividends, at 15 percent. Schwarzman characterized the proposal as being "like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939." Scores of such examples litter the landscape. In another particularly egregious example, the Speaker of the Kansas House of Representatives, Republican Mike O'Neal, referred to First Lady Michelle Obama as "Mrs. YoMama" and called her the Grinch, and then forwarded widely an e-mail that asked for Psalm 109 to be applied to the president-- a verse which says "Let his days be few in number" and "May his children be orphaned and his wife a widow." Then there was Republican Representative Allen West of Florida who told President Obama to "get the hell out of the United States of America" in a January 2012 speech captured on videotape. People like Colin Powell, Robert Gates, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Tom Brokaw, George Shultz, and Oprah WInfrey, ideally through some collective effort, should have the goal of recreating in society some sense of shame for distortions, lies, and other efforts to coarsen the culture and discourse. That means calling out miscreants like Schwarzmand, O'Neal and West. . . "
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