In Wake of Tea Parties, Left’s Anger Reaches Fever Pitch even as their side controls levers of political power

While we on the right side of the blogosphere spent the better part of last week promoting the Tea Parties and celebrating their success, this week, many of us are (once again) considering the phenomenon of the angry left. Perhaps that’s because their hysterical outbursts reached fever pitch with the success of those parties.

A grassroots movement at odds with their ideology was being born.

If they were as confident in their ideas as we conservatives were in the 1980s, they would welcome such challenges as giving them another chance to make the case for the programs the President proposes–and which they supposedly support. Shouldn’t they welcome this opportunity to defend Obama and his policies?

Instead, despite their victories last fall, they appear increasingly angry. Byron York wonders why:

These should be happy times for liberals and the Democratic party as a whole. They control the White House and both houses of Congress, while opposition Republicans are leaderless and lost. So why do some Democrats, particularly those farther to the left, appear so angry?

Just look at the tone of some of those who comment to our posts. If they had more confidence in their ideas and Democrats’ further political success, they would likely be more gracious to their adversaries, knowing we were just crying in the wilderness. More confident victors wouldn’t need slur their adversaries; they would know that their arguments would help sustain their success.

Instead, they’ve been sore winners. And as York puts it, they would rather bat down than answer such questions about the Tea Parties as “What if the protesters weren’t racists, weren’t violent, weren’t mentally defective? What if their point was legitimate, or even partly legitimate?”

Over at Protein Wisdom, Jeff Goldstein believes that the mere posing of these questions

Which supposes that, given the time and inclination, most “progressives” could formulate and then articulate an answer to such questions. Sadly, I think such supposition gives the rank and file of the left far too much credit: in my experiences dealing with the politically engaged leftist who visits this site (not a scientific sampling of rank and file leftists, to be sure, but my hunch is that those progressives who trolls “wingnut” blogs in search of “argument” conceive of themselves as politically well-versed and generally astute), their positions tend to be rote learned and attached to a kind of knee jerk tu quoque-ism, both as a defensive fallback and as a constant ready-made assertion-in-waiting.

Emphasis added. Seems he attracts the same sort of left-of-center readers as we do at GayPatriot. They do seem to come to our blog with a fixed view of the right, using our comment section to repeat positions they learned elsewhere by rote.

It’s almost as if they’re struggling mightily to convince themselves that we really are the narrow-minded troglodytes their university professors taught them that we were. If they were really convinced of the merits of their arguments, why do they expend so much energy making mean-spirited misrepresentation of our motivations while avoiding careful consideration of our arguments?

Crossposted at GayPatriot.

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