Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Scheer

The line lands like a newsroom aside that’s half lament, half indictment: honesty isn’t just risky in politics, it’s punishable. Robert Scheer is pointing to a media-political ecosystem that claims to crave authenticity while enforcing a strict emotional and rhetorical dress code. The verb choice matters. They “hung him” isn’t a measured critique; it’s a deliberately brutal metaphor that casts the downfall of Howard Dean as a public execution staged by elites who decide which kinds of candor are acceptable.

Context sharpens the bite. Dean’s 2004 run became shorthand for the “Dean scream” moment, but Scheer’s framing suggests that the scream wasn’t the real crime. The crime was deviation: Dean’s willingness to say out loud what other Democrats soft-pedaled (Iraq, corporate influence, party timidity) and to sound like a person rather than a pre-tested product. Scheer’s subtext is that modern campaigns don’t primarily punish dishonesty; they punish unsanctioned honesty, especially when it threatens donor networks, consultant narratives, or the media’s preference for gaffes over substance.

The “they” is doing quiet work, too. It’s conveniently vague, which makes it truer in the Scheer sense: blame is distributed across party operatives, cable news loops, rival campaigns, and a public trained to treat politics as performance. The sentence is built to provoke anger at the machinery, not sympathy for one candidate. It’s an argument that the boundaries of permissible speech are enforced less by censorship than by spectacle.