See, this is what drives people crazy about political reporting. Roger Simon is arguing—I think—against excessive anger, paranoia and hyper-partisanship in politics; I believe that is what he is saying. But his lead sentence is:
In this election: A woman gets flung to the ground and stomped on the head.
Except that a) she very clear is NOT "flung" to the ground, b) she very clearly is not "stomped", and c) it is very clearly not on the head. I challenge you to go get the video, right now, and look at it. The woman is trying to push forward, trying to get near Rand Paul so that she can embarrass him somehow, and is confronted by Rand Paul volunteers. She is grabbed by Paul’s defenders, one of whom loses his balance and drags her to the ground. If you said she was "wrestled" to the ground it would still be inaccurate, because this would still imply that someone intended for her to be put to the ground, which does not seem to be the case. But that’s a judgment call, and if you said she was wrestled to the ground, I wouldn’t argue with you. But saying she is "flung" to the ground is clearly and absolutely not what happened.
"Stomped"? Stomped, really? Judgment call, I guess. "Stomped", I think, usually means that the foot is brought down with maximum force so as to deliver a blow, usually repeatedly. Stand up, lift your left leg, slam it to the ground. That’s a stomp. Lift your left leg, lower it so that it is in contact with something, and then push down; push down hard. Is that really a stomp? Go watch the video.
And, point three, it’s very obviously her shoulder that is being pushed down, not her head.
Now, here comes the part where some jackass will say that I am "defending" the stomper. I’m not ‘defending" him in any way, shape or form. When a woman is wrestled to the ground in a crowd, you help her up--whether you like her politics or not.
I’m defending integrity in journalism. People think that sportswriters are second-class journalists who write emotionally and exaggerate things so that they seem important. Suppose that a sportswriter said that the ball was drilled to the second baseman, and fired to the shortstop covering second for a double play, only the video clearly showed that the ball was grounded to second and flipped backhand to the shortstop, and there was no out on the play. The sportswriter would get fired, right? Maybe he wouldn’t, but. . .he ought to be.
But sports, because they are not really important, are objectively reported. Politics, because the people who write about politics are so convinced of the urgency of what they are saying, are reported on constantly in passionate terms that bluntly ignore the objective facts well documented by easily available video.
Simon is pretending to argue for lowering the temperature of the debate, but he is doing so by childish exaggerations of an emotional incident—and the only people who will be criticized for that will be those of us who try to point out that what he is saying is not actually what happened.
Here’s how we can fix politics in America, in one sentence.
Anybody and everybody who says that that woman was stomped on the head should have been fired.