Bill Maher, Michele Bachmann and anger f*cking

These comments reveal not only the psychiatric disorders of those who say them, but also the speakers’ realization of the virtue of those whom they attack. Secretly, the narcissistic attacker covets that which he claims to destroy. Eminem raps about having sex with Sarah Palin; hack journalist Matt Taibbi snarkily anticipates the porn movies based on Michele Bachmann; Keith Olbermann calls Michelle Malkin “a mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it.” But it is impossible to separate the act of sex from the love that the act generates. Even in the hottest, most casual encounter, there is tenderness, acceptance, the view of the other as a healer — and as good. And, of course, there is God. Like grief, sex puts us in a place where we can be with God. That’s why it is so despicable to violate that space with the profane. And it’s why conservatives, who tend to be more religious, don’t go there. Katrina Vanden Heuvel, Naomi Wolf and Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez are plenty hot. But we don’t respond to their positions by calling them twats (Maher on Palin) or encouraging rape.

Deep down, beneath the coward who craves approval from the crowd, Maron and Maher know that women like Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin are virtuous people. They represent beauty and fertility (Palin), compassion (Bachmann with her foster children) and the irreducible goodness of the heterosexual marriage. Beneath all the rage, the Marons, Mahers and Savages of the world know this. Savage doesn’t have fantasies about Santorum because he hates him. In fact, he probably loves Santorum, a handsome, masculine man who represents Gore Vidal’s paradox of homosexual lust — the craving for strong, powerful men despite the fact that most of those men are straight. On “Real Time,” Maron emphasized, after his “joke,” that he “has thought of” sex with Bachmann. Yet that admission of a healthy male impulse, the desire to be close to an attractive woman, is not acceptable to the fascist left — the cool kids. Therefore, it must be couched in the language of rape. You hear it on high school playgrounds all the time: “Yeah, she’s a bitch, but I’d do her — just to piss her off.”

The other component of the left’s rage has to do with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. As I have noted in TheDC before, the most profound political book I have read in the last several years is James Piereson’s “Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism.” In it, Piereson argues that after the murder of John F. Kennedy, American liberalism was never the same. Because liberals could not bring themselves to admit that a communist killed Kennedy, they performed a magic trick wherein Kennedy became a liberal martyr to civil rights. This was despite the fact that Kennedy dragged his feet on civil rights. Before Kennedy’s death, mainstream liberals had been patriotic and pro-American; yet as they blamed Kennedy’s death on the “undercurrent of right-wing violence” in America, they began to view their own country with suspicion, and even hatred. Since then, absolutely anything that smells mildly of conservatism, from tax cuts to the military, is incipient fascism that must be beaten back. Savage’s generation, which is my generation, grew up brainwashed by the left to think that every time a kid prayed in school or a preacher doubted the virtues of gay sex, it was the second coming of Hitler. This paranoia, fused with the psychological handicap of the narcissist, as well as the demands of ever-escalating rhetoric from the cool kids in the media (Maher), explains Maron’s language of rape.

Without a Morris Day moment or some therapy for the left, this stuff will probably continue to go on. Deeply troubled individuals like Maron and Savage will keep going too far — the clinical narcissist, crippled by rage and needing constant attention, can’t help but do so.

Mark Judge is the author of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock ‘n’ Roll.