Andrew Leigh on the Left's Rage on National Review Online - Anger Mismanagement

The Left is at alert-level HATE.

By Andrew Leigh

I know a wealthy couple in southern California, well-educated, with a son about ten years old. The husband has a high-paying job with a movie studio, the mother owns a successful home business, easily placing them in that $200,000-plus income bracket which Kerry promises to tax more. And yet they hate President George W. Bush with unbridled passion.

A family that does everything together, they actively encourage their son to share in this hate. Their beautiful home, in a very posh neighborhood, brims over with anti-Bush books, from Noam Chomsky's latest to Michael Moore's most vociferous. The son's room features one of those standing punching bags with Bush's image on it. Magnetically pinned to the refrigerator door, alongside the son's lovingly displayed schoolwork, are all sorts of demeaning caricatures of the president, including a target symbol with Bush's face in the middle. But on the back of their SUV, next to their shiny new 'Kerry-Edwards' bumper sticker, they have a faded one that reads, 'Teach Peace.'

Many L.A. Republicans view placing a Bush-Cheney bumper-sticker on one's car, on the other hand, as an act of courage akin to storming the beaches at Normandy. Stories abound of cars defaced by a keying job just because the owner had the temerity to hang a Republican sign in his rear window. As Richard Rushfield, writing for Slate magazine, discovered in a sociological experiment, wearing a Bush-Cheney T-shirt in most parts of L.A. is a ticket to verbal abuse.

The rage of the American Left has spilled over the banks and threatens to drive all common decency before it. For the first time in my life, I have felt that the United States is in actual danger of degenerating into a banana republic, with both sides doomed to snipe at each other from behind ramparts, whether with legal briefs or actual guns.

Indeed guns have already been used, as yahoos have reportedly fired shots into GOP headquarters in several states. And there are disconcerting accounts of union goons and other Democratic activists intimidating voters as they attempt to exercise their rightful franchise in "early voting."

The Democratic party has announced its intent to declare victory no matter the electoral outcome, and to preemptively find voting irregularities even where none occur. Numerous improprieties in Democratic voter-registration efforts have already been uncovered. Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, said that there won't be any riots — as long as the Democrats win. Regarding Sinclair Broadcasting's plans to air a documentary on Kerry's anti-war activities, a Kerry-campaign advisor snarled, "They better hope we don't win."

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