Meet the Angry Right, same as the Angry Left

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Back in October, during the final days of the US presidential race, The Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal editor, James Taranto, who gets it right quite often, gave us the heads up on rise of the Angry Right, a phenomenon no less unwelcome than its rabidly incontinent left wing equivalent, for all its inevitability.... Read more...

For years this column has chronicled the follies and outrages of the Angry Left. If we are now seeing the emergence of an Angry Right, that is not a good sign for either the country or those on the conservative and Republican sides of the ideological and partisan divides.

Political hatred is not only wrong, it is counterproductive. As we observed in 2005, "one reason Democrats failed to unseat President Bush was that they were blinded by their hatred for him. This made them overconfident, as they mistook their emotions for facts."

Furthermore, expressions of hatred are unattractive to those who do not share the feeling--a category that presumably includes almost all of the independent and undecided voters who will end up deciding the election. For the Obama campaign and its allies in the media, then, the Angry Right's behavior is an opportunity: a chance to make the other side--including the McCain campaign itself--look like a bunch of scary wackos.

À propos of which, The Slinger was saddened, but not surprised, to come across this transparent example of barrel scraping.

The MSM may well have given Obama an armchair ride during the election campaign, but how many undecideds do our colleagues at Conservative Oasis expect to win over to their cause with nonsense like that?

Not to mention this foam-flecked diatribe from Alan Keyes, which went viral about 30 seconds after it was aired.

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On a personal note, it's good to be back after a two year career-enforced hiatus, and good to see how many of the old salts that we used to follow are still putting blinkered ideologues and political chancers alike through the wringer.