Rhetoric has no taste. Once you’re down with the great cause, assailing malfeasant demons, in or out of public office, why hold back? Why throttle your invective short of what libel rulings allow?What‘s newly remarkable about this abusive verbal assault, however, isn’t so much how thoughtless and extreme it gets, but how suddenly it can rise, and to what heights. As the Clinton presidency has amply shown.Locally, protests against the ouster of Los Angeles schools Superintendent Ruben Zacarias were angry but decorous. On the Net, however, decorum is dead. By October 25, e-mail was circulating that described the entire school contretemps as nothing less than a Jewish plot. But this notion had first appeared the day before in the Los Angeles Times, of all places, toward the end of a front-page ”analysis.“ Writers Ted Rohrlich and Antonio Olivo, after a summary of adverse community comment on the Ruben Zacarias ouster, recorded the same slur, minus attribution.
Source: Dialogue of Slurs | L.A. Weekly