Don Feder, GrassTopsUSA.com

About a week ago, I had another lesson in liberal civility.

I was pulling into the parking lot of a burger-joint when an agitated young man drove up next to me. He rolled down his window, as I did. I thought I might have cut him off in traffic and prepared to apologize.

The first words out of his mouth were: “Are you a retard?” This is known as a rhetorical question. I was tempted to answer, “No, but I am still beating my wife.”

The graduate of The Charlie Sheen School of Refinement was incensed by one of my bumper stickers, “Global Warming: a dangerous man-made phenomenon caused by the mixture of recycled Marxist ideas and junk science.”

I told him I wasn’t going to have a conversation with someone who begins by asking if I’m “special.” We went into the restaurant. He was calm for a while, but as soon as he finished eating, he began loudly berating me again.

I was a “cretin.” I was too stupid to live in a superior state like Massachusetts and should move to Tennessee, where people are such mental defectives that they question the revealed truth of global warming. “Like Al Gore,” I innocently asked? That enraged him further. Finally, he delivered what he considered the coup de grace, telling other diners that I was a product of FOX News. Then he stormed out.

One of the cooks came out from behind the counter and asked if I wanted him to call the cops. I said no, my assailant was probably an Obama supporter who was off his medication. Massachusetts is lousy with such louts — not surprising, as we are the capital of thumb-sucking liberalism.

But, not to worry. The civility-mongers just opened the National Institute for Civil Discourse at the University of Arizona. By this time next year, we’ll all be going around bowing or curtseying to each other and saying: “Pray, pardon me” and “I beg to differ.” Soon, the entire country will resemble a Regency drawing room out of “Sense and Sensibility.”

According to the Institute’s website, it will be a “national, nonpartisan center for debate, research, education and policy generation regarding civic engagement and civility in public discourse consistent with First Amendment principles.”

In a Q&A describing its purpose, the Institute answered hypothetical questions about the Big C, including: “Are you blaming heated rhetoric for the Tucson shootings? Absolutely not. But the shootings created a space for people to focus on civility, and the Institute is building on that positive outcome of a tragic event.”

If the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the murder of six others had “absolutely” nothing to do with civility, how exactly did it create a “space for people to focus” on same? Caution: Never expect consistency from the Left or ask liberals to define their terms (like “climate of hate”); it only confuses and agitates them

The only connection between the Tucson tragedy and civility is that a lot of people on the Left blamed the rampage on lack of civility among conservatives, without a scintilla of evidence to corroborate the claim.

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