You want to motivate somebody, get him angry. Hoo boy, did the Republican party learn that trick. Make the troops froth at abortionists. Fuel their fury at homos. Incite them to righteous indignation about stem cell research. Right wingers love to hate.

Me, I don’t hate abortionists or gays. I just hate right wingers. Wait. That didn’t come out right.

Or did it?

We on the left also love to hate. It’s invigorating, all the more so because it’s so often justified.

In my last posting, I insulted the anti-stem cell research people, insisting that they were “sneaky, sore losers” for trying to reverse the ’06 constitutional amendment. I called them “a-single-cell-is-worth-the-lives-of-thousands-if-I-say-it-is fanatics”. And why should I regret my surliness? Those scurvy, dishonest, greedy Republican leaders and the lemmings who hang on their lies are so …  wrong.  

Now. If that annoying little whisper in the back of my mind would just shut up: the one that says, I can imagine right wingers saying, “those liberals are just so … wrong.”

Look at the abortion issue from a fundamentalist’s point of view: those lefties always think that people ought to do it THEIR way. They’re forever trying to undo what we accomplish. We no sooner get some limitations passed on baby killing than they get busy trying to reverse it.

And, Mr. and Ms. Progressive Activist, don’t kid yourself. Like our opposite numbers, we’re angry, wroth at the way those empty minded sheep let themselves be bamboozled by the likes of Bush and Cheney, Dobson and Robertson. They believed Jerry Falwell when he told them Tinky Winky was gay because he was purple. They listen to the likes of  Charles Krauthammer, who had this to say recently:

Everyone knows the First Amendment protects freedom of religion, speech, press and assembly. How many remember that, in addition, the First Amendment protects a fifth freedom-to lobby?

Of course it doesn’t use the word lobby. It calls it the right “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Lobbyists are people hired to do that for you, so that you can actually stay home with the kids and remain gainfully employed rather than spend your life in the corridors of Washington.

What sane response is there to such a crock but derision?

Still … Maybe it’s one thing to believe that our priorities and logic are superior to theirs and another to treat them like morons or devils. On purely pragmatic grounds, that may be stupid on our part. Such sneering hostility is hardly likely to gather into our fold those wavering souls who, increasingly disillusioned with what Republicanism hath wrought, regret their votes for Bush.

But having seen the depradations of the last seven years, we are irate and frightened for our country and we have every right to be. Who wouldn’t lash out occasionally at these I-won’t-give-up-until-everybody-does-it-MY-way ideologues” dragging us down the road to doom.

Besides, there’s nobody here but us chickens. The Republicans don’t bother listening in on this website, and we need a place to rant.

Right?