Liberal McCarthyism

I chose stole the title of this post from a piece in the Opinion Journal about the extreme hatred on the left side of the aisle of anyone who disagrees with them. The piece goes on to say that as they were brought up in a liberal household, they were taught that only the right is able to spew hatred and vitriol and the left is way more tolerant of others. But the writer, Lanny Davis, White House special counsel during the Clinton years, goes on to note that the vile, anti-semetic, emotionally charged, offensive sewage that gets posted at various liberal blogs, such as the Huffington Post and Daily Kos, has convinced him that his assumptions were wrong.
Well, for once, Lanny and I agree on something. Having just been in a policial discussion with my boss, who is a liberal somewhere left of Cynthia McKinney, I could see the anger and emotion in her eyes and hear it in her yelling points of view. Her utter lack of ability to HEAR what I was saying and inability to accept the fact that not all Republicans were 1. stupid, 2. evil, 3. rich, or 4. looking to exploit 'the people' showed me exactly what Lanny writes about in this piece.
They are so married to this hatred of conservatives and their ideas, or even anyone that doesn't agree with them, including more moderate Democrats (read: Joe Lieberman) have to be hated, that I'm not sure how they'll ever reconcile their emotions into some form of reasonableness.
Now during the 90's, there was some definite dislike of Bill Clinton and in some wings of the conservative/libertarian movements, some definite hatred. But I never saw it to this degree. I never saw the hatred to the point of not just wanting to defeat their ideas, but to destroy them personally and politically. Clinton used a term that I think is actually applicable today, 'the politics of personal destruction'. He used it in a paranoid fashion where he was accusing his opponents of trying to personally destroy him, when in actuality, he WAS having sex in the Oval Office with an intern (thus showing himself to be a liar). However, most conservatives knew that Clinton was just a buffoon, not really someone to be hated, but rather worked against to ensure that his policies didn't become law.

Something I find interesting is that during the 2000 election, I was having a debate online with an anarchist, who said that if Bush wins, activism will begin to awake from an 8 year slumber and start showing up again. I disagreed with his take that activism had been dead, merely that it takes different forms when Republicans are doing it than when Democrats are. But he certainly was right, the leftwing/anarchist activists are out in full force, marching in the streets, protesting, etc.
Always wondered why Republican/conservatives don't do that, and then I remembered that the majority of us have jobs...jobs that don't let us do that sort of thing. Not in unions where they're paid to show up to protests like that. Not students who live off mommy and daddy's money. Jobs. The types of jobs that keep the economy moving forward so that mommy and daddy can keep sending the punk anarchists to school, and the types of jobs that help prop up those failed unions.