The Angry Left

I meant to comment on this article about the "angry left" the other day but didn't have the time. I know, I know, I'm unemployed and yet I still seem to be running a time deficit. Anyway, here's an excerpt that gives you the gist:

The people she's connected to include Shanikka, who decides one day to post on O'Connor's Web site a 737-word "open letter to President George W. Bush" that says in part: "You can't hide from the truth, Dubbya. You also can't hide from yourself. And it is YOU, Mr. President, that you need to run from. Because you are the problem. You destroy everything you touch professionally when you're left to do what you want. Everything."

To which another of O'Connor's connections, Bill, responds, "A most excelentest rant, shanikka, but don't you think you should distill this down to twenty-five words or less if you want [Bush] to read it? Or have it read to him. I'm sure he has ADD."

To which Nite74 responds, "ADD implies that some attention span is already present to be deficient."

To which Linnaeus responds, "I might say, though, that saying he has ADD is an insult to those who actually have it."

To which Bill, responding to his responders, writes, "It was rather though[t]less of me to compare the most asinine, brutal, criminal, disgusting, enraging, felonious, gross, horrendous, incompetent, jaundiced, kleptocratic, lazy, malicious, nefarious, objectional, psychopathic, quarrelsome, repulsive, sanctimonious, treasonous, unfit, vindictive, wasteful, xenophobic, yahooish, zealotic piece of [expletive] inhabiting the White House and the planet to persons suffering with a neurobiological disorder."

And on it goes, every day, around the clock, on Web site after Web site. Since its debut last July, My Left Wing has had some 450,000 visits and is now averaging about 3,000 visits and 14,000 page views a day. At any given moment, several dozen people are looking at the site, and user data shows that they are all over the world -- mostly from the United States, occasionally from overseas and often from Washington, D.C., where the log-on addresses sometimes end in senate.gov or house.gov.

I had a variety of reactions to this article. While I imagine that a number of people are likely to view the article as a hatchet job on the lefty blogger community it rang pretty true to me. Everytime I check out what the other side has to say I am struck by the intense vitriol and the rampant use of swear words. Using the "F word" three times in a sentence does not make you appear any more intelligent or your argument any more convincing.

And it isn't enough to merely disagree with Bush, Republicans, etc., the left also feels the need to assign them the basest of motivations for their actions. It's not enough to say that tax cuts are inappropriate and bad fiscal policy -- they are also being wielded as a tool designed to screw the poor and help the rich. Iraq isn't a misguided attempt to spread democracy, but the deliberate rape and pillaging of another country to satisfy the puppet masters of oil corporations. Etc.

Perhaps most notably, all of this intense anger is not doing the Democrats any favors. The inability to make calm and coherent arguments about issues and reliance on personal demonization of Bush to carry the day is costing them votes. One would have thought that the lack of GOP electoral success while demonizing Clinton from 1995-2000 would have held some lessons for the Democrats but apparently not.

I also found the article depressing on a personal level. This woman gets up everyday consumed with anger at the fact that George W. Bush is president. And to what end? Life is too short to get completely caught up in politics. This woman has a husband and son and the only thing she can focus on is the alleged nefariousness of the Bush Administration.

What a waste.

I hope conservatives draw some conclusions from this. Republicans won't be in power forever, or even perhaps very long. Democrats will regain the White House, Congress or both. And when they do they must stick to the issues if they want to reverse their fortunes. Stating that Person X is a scumbag is not an argument, even when it is true. Republicans spent too much time demonizing Clinton during the 90s and it got them nowhere. As much of the left continues to demonstrate, you cannot win political battles when you are blinded by your own rage.