Obama's prize fuels even more public sparring

Will it never stop?

Will we ever see the end of the snarling and seething at one another that are consuming politics in 21st century America?

I'm bone-weary of the vicious verbal sparring, and I'm assuming that millions of other Americans are tired of the conflict, too.

Yet it is everywhere: on television, especially, and all over the Internet and talk radio.

Too many ordinary people seem to be following the cues of commentators and bloggers, so that it's hard to have a civil conversation at a party or over dinner if it's related to politics.

We saw Friday just how bad the tenor of the national conversation has gotten, when Americans woke up to the news that President Barack Obama had won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.

If you had supposed that people would say, "Wow, that's great," you would have been very wrong.

By the time I got to the office and turned on my computer, the airwaves and Internet were awash in howls that, at best, Obama does not deserve the prize and, at worst, the award is part of the Nobel committee's "affirmative action quota."

There also were assorted e-mails already bouncing around the country, reminding people that among Obama's prize-winning colleagues is the late Yasser Arafat, noted terrorist.

By lunchtime, talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh had proclaimed the award a "greater embarrassment" than losing the Olympics.

Are we no longer capable of measured give-and-take in the public square? If we disagree with somebody on "the other side," regardless of which side that might be, do we have to pelt him or her with ugly pejoratives?

Apparently so.

Sadly, we seem to have been this way since the mid-1990s, when there came the perfect storm of the badly behaving Bill Clinton, the development of the Internet and the explosion of talk radio....