And he called out 60 Minutes' Steve Kroft for enabling Obama to make a point about promoting civility, without having challenged Obama for having called the actions of the arresting officer in the Professor Henry Louis Gates Affair, "stupid" (not to mention subsequently inviting this same officer to to the White House for a beer.) This blog addressed it here.
His home team that day, the Ravens, had amassed over 500 total yards and largely dominated the Kansas City Chiefs, yet for a while were in danger of losing the game. Perhaps as a result, at the end of the game, the team engaged in some uncivil (and strategically ill-advised) behavior; by, with around 40 seconds to go, up by 7, from inside the one, going for the touchdown instead of the field goal on 4th down. Had they been stopped, K.C. would have had a chance (albeit a very small chance) to come back and win the game. Had they kicked the field goal, Kansas city would have had to had received a kickoff, scored a touchdown, recovered an onside kick, and scored again, all within about 30 seconds. Virtually an impossibility.
An Admin' from this blog posted the following comment to Zurawik's 60 Minutes critique:
Did you catch the Ravens game? Now there was some uncivil behavior, speaking of end zones.Rather incredibly, this comment was apparently not "approved" by the "blog author" and professional critic Zurawik. Perhaps there was some sort of strange, blog error on the blog, so we can't be certain -- but Zurawik could certainly clarify this. Email is Admin@WeMisleadYouFollow.com [Update: of course Zurawik never did.]
I Agree Obama was very foolish to have used that term. I do not agree however, that calling actions that in fact were likely stupid, as stupid, is all that uncivil. [Once It was clear Gates had not broken into his home, and understandable that he would have been upset, whether he overreacted or not,THERE WAS NO ISSUE LEFT. Making it into one, rather than politely apologizing for the rather comical (or not, as far as Gates is concerned) mixup, was an extremely poor error of judgment and/or use of authoritative power.]
Or, at least not to the level of many months later taking issue with Obama's claim that we need more civility, when overall he has been on the receiving end of an enormous amount of uncivility, and otherwise been reasonably civil and courteous himself -- and was agreeing with a relatively important point.
With respect to your very last point, I don't believe Obama was "blaming it all" on the 24 hour news cycles. But, aside from, uh, "all of us," which I for one know is not accurate, who would you blame it on?"
