A week after the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision and the left shows no sign of even cooling its rhetoric, much less coming to terms with the truth. Don’t even bother trying to point out that the chain covers 16 of 20 birth control products; that’s a wasted effort. They retort with outrageous claims, like the this particular hyperventilating article on the Huffington Post.
The latest burst of psychosis comes from woman who attacked young pro-life protester with a stream of obscenities. One obvious takeaway is that the woman in the video is irrationally unhinged over a few posters to the point of putting her hands on another person in a threatening manner.
The left’s unhinged behavior has left many an editorialist scratching their heads in utter confusion. They can’t get over the raging insanity and frothing at the mouth levels of anger and hatred spewing from the left, especially given the facts of the Hobby Lobby case.
Authors have written about the craziness of the left in recent years, such as Michelle Malkin in Unhinged. or Greg Gutfeld in The Joy of Hate, but they never looked closer at the causes. They just listed one outrage after another.
That’s probably because it’s risky to play armchair psychiatrist, but I’ll take a stab at it. In college, where good young Americans are indoctrinated in liberalism, I remember hearing this phrase over and over: “Anger is a healthy response.” People chanted it like a mantra; four legs good, two legs bad, anger is a healthy response.
Well no, it’s not. If you do anything over and over again, what happens? You get really good at it. And the left, so studied and practiced at getting pissed off, now does it with the expertise of Neil Peart playing drums, Tom Brady passing footballs and Jay Leno working an audience.
They have practiced outrage for years. Their leaders have used it as motivators. After the 2000 Florida recount mess, then-DNC chair Terry McAuliffe said he would use resentment over the recount as a way to motivate the base. That could arguably be the start of what Charles Krauthammer later dubbed “Bush derangement syndrome.”
What is Media Matters but an outlet for making liberals mad about everything Rush Limbaugh and Fox News say? Generate that outrage. Keep poking them with a sharp stick. Make them mad. Sooner or later, all they know is how to be mad. And as Gustave Le Bon noted in his 1895 book The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, it’s that a group of like-minded people does not moderate itself. It accelerates.
Not surprisingly, a lot of people don’t want to deal with this endless stream of bile. In January 2007, the Santa Cruz, Calif. radio station KOMY dropped Air America, replacing it with music from the 1950s, 60s and 70s. It wasn’t for ratings. After all, if you can’t sell liberal radio in Santa Cruz, you’re hopeless. The station did well, but it couldn’t get advertisers. “It’s an angry, nasty, pissing and moaning format where the only thing they say is ‘Bush stinks’ or ‘Bush is bad’,” station owner Michael Zwerling told the Santa Cruz Sentinel. “No commercial advertiser wants to be associated with that.”
It gets worse when you take into account the fact that the left is now not only lying on the political stage and in the media to others but it’s also lying to itself. Look at the hysterical reaction to the Hobby Lobby decision. The Huffington Post article illustrates that perfectly. I would be more likely to believe that piece if The Onion ran it. No, the Hobby Lobby decision does not mean Christians can practice stoning as punishment, but that’s what they believe. I keep wondering, is this clever satire?
These sorts of arguments illustrate the futility of dealing with the left. How in the world do you have a debate with people who tell themselves vicious lies and then get worked up into a hysterical frenzy? I have a mix of friends across the spectrum on my Facebook page, and I’ve just given up dealing with the liberals. They were making equally ridiculous posts and all I could do was throw my hands up and just move on.
I don’t deny the right has more than enough hatred. I hear the things said about Obama. But I don’t think they marinate in it the way the left does. I’ve never once heard a conservative utter the “anger is a healthy response” nonsense mantra once. One thing I’ve noticed on message boards in the last few months is conservatives are shunning radio talk show host Michael Savage because they are not happy with his constant attacks on other conservative talkers and his bitterness in general.
Nor is this a blanket indictment of the left. There are some with a healthy sense of humor. Jon Stewart comes to mind. Yes, he’s in the tank for the left, but he’ll call them out or turn a blind eye. His primary weapon, like Rush 25 years ago, is humor.
After spending so much time poking themselves with a sharp stick, liberals are a miserable, unhappy bunch. And I’m getting tired of it. The unfortunate part is that once you cut out the perpetually enraged on the right in left, all you have left is the apathetic.
And yet, I can’t help but think about the special on the History channel about the seven deadly sins. One of the talking heads noted that anger is the only one of the seven deadlies where you are not in control of yourself. Think about it. When you are angry, you have ceded control to someone or something external to you.
So I wonder if this all isn’t by design, like McAullife said, to manipulate their base through emotion. The fact the left accuses the right of doing this so much only buttresses my belief, because if there’s one thing I’ve learned about the left, they are tremendous projectors. Everything they accuse the right of doing, they do themselves.
Brace yourselves. With the upcoming election and Obama falling further out of favor, you know it’s going to be ugly this November, and the left is going to lose its mind if the Senate is taken away from them. Because that’s a healthy response to them.