Rage Against the Right

I don't understand the liberal hatred and derision of the tea parties. Aren't they the ones who insisted that dissent is patriotic?

Aren't they the ones who, after an eight year diaper rash temper tantrum, finally got their way at the polls? Why is the left so angry?

Dana Milbank at WaPo, no conservative, concludes that "But now, even under Obama, the anger on the left is, if anything, more personal and vitriolic than on the right." He cites some reader comments:

But many focused on a frustration on the left caused by Obama's centrism -- his opposition to prosecuting those involved with torture, for example. "I am angry because the whole Republican party has not been rounded up and thrown into a black site," one wrote. A reader in Evanston, Ill., took a similar view, that true believers on the left don't want "b.s. rhetoric about looking forward."

They won't be happy until Bush administration officials, including King George himself, are frog marched off to be publicly guillotined and the grubby conservative royalists are cowering silently in cellars and garrets across the countryside, stripped of their guns and bibles.

Byron York gives us his take:

I asked William Anderson, a friend who is a political conservative, a medical doctor, and a lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard. "They are angry, but I think they are also scared, and I think it's because they have a sense that their triumph is a precarious one," Anderson told me. Democrats won in 2008 in some part because of the cycles of American politics; Republicans were exhausted and it was the other party's turn. Now, having won, they are unsure of how long victory will last.

"They see that they have a very small window of opportunity to do all the things they want," Anderson continued. "They see the window of opportunity as small because they know in their deepest hearts that the vast majority of the American people wouldn't go for all of the things they want to do." So they are frantic to do as much as possible before the opposition coalesces. And the tea parties might be the beginning of that coalescence.

York also points to the need to demonize an opponent whose argument you cannot refute:

Again, the tea parties could represent a threat. What if the protesters weren't racists, weren't violent, weren't mentally defective? What if their point was legitimate, or even partly legitimate? Those are questions better batted down than answered.

A Jack Nicholson would say, "They can't HANDLE the truth!"

You can see pictures from the tax day rallies at Creative Flashes. You can read the crabby leftist reaction at the Huffpo here and here.

Washington Examiner
Creative Flashes
HuffPo
WaPo