Violence and Harassment Against Conservatives and Trump Supporters

It’s a standard tactic of partisans to accuse people on the other side of being violent crazies. And indeed, liberals can not shut up about the woman who was killed by a white supremacist in Charlottesville. Then there was the case of Gabrielle Giffords who was shot by a lunatic with completely undecipherable political views, but the media blamed Sarah Palin!

But sometimes one side is the violent and unhinged force in American politics.

Just now, it’s the anti-Trump left. Enraged by Trump’s successes — most recently, the Senate confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh — they have been on a rampage, and this has included not merely public temper tantrums, but stalking, harassment, threats of violence and outright attacks.

The List

Breitbart assiduously keeps track of these incidents, and their list now extends to 583 cases (it might be longer when you read this).

Some random entries:

October 8, 2018: Leftist Teacher Tweets: “So Who’s Gonna Take One For the Team and Kill Kavanaugh?”

October 6, 2018: Sen. Collins Flooded with Abusive Tweets Threatening Death, Violence

October 1, 2018: Vandals Hit IL GOP Headquarters With ‘RAPE’ Graffiti

October 1, 2018: Senator Mitch McConnell Badgered At Airport By Anti-Kavanaugh Activists

September 30, 2018: Georgetown prof: White GOP senators in Kavanaugh hearing ‘deserve miserable deaths’

September 25, 2018: CNN Defends harassment of Ted Cruz

September 25, 2018: Ted Cruz and Wife harassed out of DC restaurant

September 10,2018: Broadway Star Carole Cook on Trump: ‘Where’s John Wilkes Booth When you Need Him?

September 6, 2018: Black Trump Fan Booted from Bar for Wearing Trump Hat

. . . and on and on.

It would be unfair to say that the average liberal would do any of these things.  But such things are increasingly condoned by mainstream Democrats. The New York Times, for example, has noted that these kinds of attacks have “opened a rift in the party over whether stoking anti-Trump outrage is helping or undermining its prospects in the midterm elections.”

Younger Democrats, the Times notes:

. . . believe that conventional politics are insufficient to the threat posed by a would-be authoritarian — and that their millennial and nonwhite base must be assured that the party is doing all it can to halt Mr. Trump.

Thus the bigotry and intolerance of the campus left is increasingly infiltrating the Democratic Party. Only a resounding defeat at the ballot box (or perhaps it will take two or three) is likely to cause liberals to back off of tactics that can only be described as fascist.

Update

Yes, and now Hillary supports the nastiness:

During an interview with CNN on Tuesday, former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton stated that it’s impossible to be civil with a party “that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about.” She continued that if Democrats win back one or both chambers of Congress, “that’s when civility can start again.”

Hillary said, “You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about. That’s why I believe, if we are fortunate enough to win back the House and/or the Senate, that’s when civility can start again. But until then, the only thing that the Republicans seem to recognize and respect is strength.”

This is a new level of cluelessness, even for Hillary. The fascist tactics don’t show strength, they show weakness.

Trump: Very Lucky in His Enemies

Peggy Noonan is far from being a Trump supporter, although she’s not an implacable enemy either. She sees his flaws, but hopes he will do better.

But she notes that Trump has one huge asset: his enemies.

Mr. Trump has struggled so colorfully the past three months, we’ve barely noticed his great good luck—that in that time the Democratic Party and the progressive left have been having a very public nervous breakdown. The new head of the Democratic National Committee, Tom Perez, performs unhinged diatribes. He told an audience in Las Vegas that “Trump doesn’t give a sh— about health care.” In a Maine speech, “They call it a skinny budget. I call it a sh—y budget.” In Newark, he said Republicans “don’t give a sh— about people.”

This is said to be an attempt to get down with millennials. I know a lot of millennials and they’re not idiots, so that won’t work.

The perennially sunny Rep. Maxine Waters of California called Mr. Trump’s cabinet “a bunch of scumbags.” New York’s junior Democratic senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, has taken to using the F-word in interviews.

I thought Mr. Trump was supposed to be the loudmouth vulgarian who swears in public. They are aping what they profess to hate. They excoriated him for lowering the bar. Now look at them.

And they’re doing it because they have nothing else—not a plan, not a program, not a philosophy that can be uttered.

The closest they got to meaning recently was when Mr. Perez found it helpful to say, of a Democratic mayoral candidate who’d backed some pro-life bills, that that kind of thinking had no place in the party. Bernie Sanders rightly called this out as madness. You can’t do this “if we’re going to become a 50-state party.”

Imagine a great, lost party defining itself by who it’s throwing out. They’re like the Republicans the past 20 years, throwing people out for opposing Iraq or George W. Bush, or for not joining NeverTrump. Where does this get you? It gets you to where we are.

That most entrenched bastion of the progressive left, America’s great universities, has been swept by . . . well, one hardly knows what to call it. “Political correctness” is too old and doesn’t do it justice. It is a hysteria—a screeching, ignorant wave of sometimes violent intolerance for free speech. It is mortifying to see those who lead great universities cower in fear of it, attempt to placate it, instead of stopping it.

When I see tapes of the protests and riots at schools like Berkeley, Middlebury, Claremont McKenna and Yale, it doesn’t have the feel of something that happens in politics. It has the special brew of malice and personal instability seen in the Salem witch trials. It sent me back to rereading Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible.” Heather Mac Donald danced with the devil! Charles Murray put the needle in the poppet! As in 17th-century Salem, the accusers have no proof of anything because they don’t know, read or comprehend anything.

The cursing pols, the anathematizing abortion advocates, the screeching students—they are now the face of the progressive left.

This is what America sees now as the face of the Democratic Party. It is a party blowing itself up whose only hope is that Donald Trump blows up first.

He may not be lucky in all of his decisions or staffers, or in his own immaturities and dramas. But hand it to him a hundred days in: He’s lucky in his main foes.

Even a casual observer can add to her list of liberal derangement. That’s not her fault. This is a column, not a book.

Health Care

Jeff Jacoby provides several examples from the debate on health care:

• “Donald Trump and Republicans just celebrated voting to let thousands of Americans die so that billionaires get tax breaks.” Those are the words of a prominent US senator.
• “They” — Republican House members who voted for the AHCA — “should be lined up and shot. That’s not hyperbole; blood is on their hands.” So fumes a professor at the Art Institute of Washington.
• “I hope every GOPer who voted for Trumpcare sees a family member get long-term condition, lose insurance, and die. I want the GOPers who support this to feel the pain in their own families. . . . I want them to be tortured.” Those sentiments are expressed via Twitter by a senior writer at Newsweek.
• “The GOP Plan For Obamacare Could Kill More People Each Year Than Gun Homicides.” That’s the headline in Vox, a popular news and opinion website.

There is no shortage of additional examples, just as enraged or hysterical. . . .

Some progressives justify the shredding of civil discourse; with Trump in the White House, they say, courtesy is a luxury the nation can’t afford. “America, don’t be polite in the face of demagoguery,” exhorts Jessica Valenti in the Guardian. Representative Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat, is likewise unapologetic about resorting to rhetorical brutality. “This is a new time in politics where people are just blatantly lying and essentially producing policies that are going to kill people,” Gallego tells CNN. “I think the old time of civility needs to go until we actually go back to the rules.”

The Daily Caller lists many more examples of violence, harassment and intimidation.

And of course, who could forget Stephen Colbert’s deranged rant.  (Note that one word has been censored in the YouTube version, but was originally broadcast.)

Trump, it seems, is not very good at governing, but he’s great at driving his adversaries nuts. That’s a political asset, although it’s not the sort we would prefer he have.

What is new about this is not that a lot of liberals hate conservatives, and particularly hate Donald Trump (who isn’t really a conservative). People in American politics have long hated their partisan enemies. It goes back even further than the followers of Jefferson and Hamilton. And plenty of conservatives have hated liberals.

What is new, and peculiar to the left, is the overt claim that it is good to hate. That people on the other side deserve to be hated, harassed, intimidated and even attacked.

Can Snobbery Save the Liberals?

From Daniel Greenfield in Frontpage Mag:

The Atlantic’s May cover features Alec Baldwin covered in orange makeup holding up a Trump wig. The cover asks, “Can Satire Save the Republic?”

What is satire saving the Republic from? Republicans. While making America safe for Socialism.

After Bush won, Democrats fought back by doubling down on the ridicule. Before long they were getting their news from Jon Stewart’s smirk. Stewart spawned a whole range of imitators. Today you can find numberless clones of the Daily Show across cable and even on CBS and, soon, on NBC.

The left is devoutly convinced that this snickering can save America. That it’s better than the news.

The Peabody awards celebrated the Daily Show as “a trusted source of news for citizens united in their disappointment and disgust with politics and cable news.” But the media was the first in line to anoint the politics of contempt, ridicule and disgust as the future of journalism. Now the future is here.

The Washington Post, once a paper of record, swarms with snarky Stewartesque headlines like, “Jeff Sessions doesn’t think a judge in Hawaii — a.k.a. ‘an island in the Pacific’ — should overrule Trump.” Journalism is dead. And replacing it with snarky lefty spin hasn’t saved the Republic. Or anything else.

But the left’s faith in the power of its contempt has nothing to do with its tactical effectiveness.

The left remains convinced that Jon Stewart brought down Bush and Tina Fey brought down Palin because ridiculing the right isn’t just an ugly tactic. Instead it carries an almost religious meaning. Mocking Republicans can save us. Every ideology expresses its superiority through its own triumphalism. Sneering is the left’s own invocation of its own superiority. These are the grown up politics of kids who were convinced that they were better than everyone else because they looked down on them.

Much as Allahu Akbar denotes the superiority of the Muslim and the inferiority of the non-Muslim, the knowing smirk, the lifted eyebrow and the braying laugh of the audience when the unironic applause sign flashes is the prayer of the progressive to the cruel little god of his own ego.

The ritual is tribal. A lefty dons the mock wig of the hated enemy and is ritually humiliated for the entertainment of the tribes of Manhattan, Berkeley and Marin County. The foe is destroyed in effigy. The video of his destruction is virally spread with titles such as, “Saturday Night Live Destroys Trump.”

And yet Trump, like all the other viral subjects of destruction, is never destroyed. The tribal ritual lets lefties vent their anger on a totem that, unlike Trump, can actually be destroyed by liberal laughter.

Satire isn’t trying to save the Republic. It isn’t stopping Trump. It’s saving the left.

Trump has proven even more indestructible than Bush. It’s hard to think of any insult that the left hasn’t hurled his way. A dictionary of them could run all the way from Abuser to Xenophobe. To no avail. Instead he has proven exceptionally adept at treating the left with as much contempt as it treats him. When lefties bemoans his cruelty and vulgarity, what they really mean is that he is beating them at their own game without wasting time on their pretenses to saving the Republic on Saturday Night Live.

Saturday Night Live is still the only place that progressives have been able to beat Trump.

Mocking Bush didn’t save the Republic from him. If anything, liberal disdain helped make him a two-term president the way that it helped put Trump in office. Obama won by taking the opposite road. He kept his contempt and arrogance just enough in check to appear aspirational during his original race.

Elitist contempt isn’t an effective tactic. American politics is anti-establishment. Stewart, Colbert, Oliver and Bee are only revolutionary to likeminded lefties in lavish condos. To the Tennessee coal miner, the New Mexico checkout girl and the Pennsylvania steelworker they convey the smugness of an establishment in all its insufferable disdain for flyover country, for the working class and for everyone outside that golden circle of the tall towers and hot clubs in the big cities that really, truly matter.

Liberals need to believe that even their pettiest acts are ennobling. Their Whole Foods organic avocadoes are saving the planet. Their fair trade yoga pants are saving indigenous tribes. Even their ridicule of the “Other” on TV is the redemptive and salvific process by which they save America.

This isn’t idealism. It’s elitism. They’re not spitefully lashing out because they lost an election. Instead they’re saving the country by watching a lefty hack who had become more famous for his credit card commercials, and racist and homophobic slurs do a tepid slurred imitation of Trump.

What a piece of work is a progressive. How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty. In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god.

Beneath the Midtown Manhattan sound stages and green rooms, the million dollar contracts of the performers, the Ivy League degrees of the writers and the suave sophisticated five-star restaurants where they rendezvous is the dark and primitive world of the firelit circle in which enemies are bound and destroyed by a magic fed on the anger and hatred of the watchers.

The tribal signifiers of power have changed. The totems are class, cool and hip. And much of the country does not recognize their claim to lead the tribe. Each time America dissents, the left wears out its lip sneering at them. Contempt is the final refuge of failed tyrants. If you can’t rule, you can always sneer.

The left’s faith in contempt tells us far more about them than it does about the objects of their contempt. Art is a reflection of the artist. Some artists strive to create while others only destroy. The left remains convinced that it can create through destruction, that it can build a fair society through theft, an ethical society by destroying its values and a high-minded society through contempt.

It must believe in the redemptive power of its thievery, amorality and hatred. Or face a moral reckoning.

When they go low, we go higher, they chant, before laughing as Alec Baldwin snorts through his nose. It’s not funny or meaningful. It’s wish fulfillment. The left gets a Trump they can destroy in a world where they are bound to win because they are naturally superior.

For a movement obsessed with the redemptive power of its own power and convinced of the utter truth of its own imaginary visions, what could be more sacred than acting out the destruction of its enemies?

Is it any wonder that getting high on snarky delusions of potency and superiority appears so uplifting? Can satire save the Republic? Its fumes are almost as good as actually winning an election. But a better question would be can the Republic save satire?

Saturday Night Live’s war on Trump is also a war on comedy as mediocre casts turn to outside performers to portray recognizable political figures, based not on talent, but sheer recognizability.

Tina Fey had a passing resemblance to Sarah Palin while Larry David shared an accent with Bernie Sanders and was forty years older than the average SNL cast member. Alec Baldwin is a real life version of what progs think Trump is; angry, dumb and bigoted. A bad man with no self-control. And that is appropriate. The left’s effigy of Trump is a self-portrait. Their hatred of Trump is pure projection.

Baldwin’s bad acting won’t save the Republic. He isn’t funny, but he doesn’t need to be. Funny is surplus to requirements. The point isn’t laughter, it’s barely sublimated hatred. Baldwin understands hatred far better than comedy. He knows that what his prog audience wants is not a good imitation but a contemptible one. One they can despise and feel superior to. And that is what he gives them.

Saturday Night Live could not satirize Obama to save its life. It can’t satirize Trump either for the same reason. The façade of humor is falling away from the left’s worship of its ideological idols and fanatical hatred of its enemies. And hatred isn’t funny. It’s clumsy. It’s stupid. And it’s ugly.

Comedy is creative. Contempt isn’t comedy. Ultimately it’s just contemptible.

Liberals like to claim that the Trump election has loosed the forces of hatred and bigotry in America. And it has. From the left. We’ve long claimed that, relative to conservatives, liberals have a superior ability to segregate and isolate themselves from other points of view. Their college professors were virtually all liberals. Their neighborhoods are enclaves of liberalism, like the East Side in Milwaukee. They are in professions where virtually everybody is a liberal: academia, journalism, social services.

This has rendered them unable to understand or even take seriously conservative arguments. It has rendered them unable to have any empathy with working class people (the core Trump constituency) or with middle class conservatives.

They paid the piper in November 2016. And there is no reason to believe more than a tiny minority of them will learn any lessons from that. It’s just too comfortable being smug.

Anti-Christian Bigotry in Canada

Happily, Defeated

The Ugly Face of Atheism

Warning: Extremely Offensive Language



From the “Reason Rally” (read: atheist rally): one of the performers, apparently allowed to perform by the event organizers. In other words, not a street performer at the fringe of the event.

This, of course, is not your typical atheist, nor your median atheist. But the crowd seems pretty enthusiastic.

But it is a reminder that atheists have their own equivalents of the Westboro Baptist Church. But then that merrie band of bigots would not be given any official place in any Christian event organized by anybody but themselves.

And the reader might go to YouTube to see appreciative comments from secularists.

Feingold Supports Petraeus Smear Ad from Move-On.org

Here is some background.

Here is the breakdown.

Amendment Number: S.Amdt. 2934 to S.Amdt. 2011 to H.R. 1585 (National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008)

Statement of Purpose: To express the sense of the Senate that General David H. Petraeus, Commanding General, Multi-National Force-Iraq, deserves the full support of the Senate and strongly condemn personal attacks on the honor and integrity of General Petraeus and all members of the United States Armed Forces.

Akaka (D-HI), Nay
Alexander (R-TN), Yea
Allard (R-CO), Yea
Barrasso (R-WY), Yea
Baucus (D-MT), Yea
Bayh (D-IN), Yea
Bennett (R-UT), Yea
Biden (D-DE), Not Voting
Bingaman (D-NM), Nay
Bond (R-MO), Yea
Boxer (D-CA), Nay
Brown (D-OH), Nay
Brownback (R-KS), Yea
Bunning (R-KY), Yea
Burr (R-NC), Yea
Byrd (D-WV), Nay
Cantwell (D-WA), Not Voting
Cardin (D-MD), Yea
Carper (D-DE), Yea
Casey (D-PA), Yea
Chambliss (R-GA), Yea
Clinton (D-NY), Nay
Coburn (R-OK), Yea
Cochran (R-MS), Yea
Coleman (R-MN), Yea
Collins (R-ME), Yea
Conrad (D-ND), Yea
Corker (R-TN), Yea
Cornyn (R-TX), Yea
Craig (R-ID), Yea
Crapo (R-ID), Yea
DeMint (R-SC), Yea
Dodd (D-CT), Nay
Dole (R-NC), Yea
Domenici (R-NM), Yea
Dorgan (D-ND), Yea
Durbin (D-IL), Nay
Ensign (R-NV), Yea
Enzi (R-WY), Yea
Feingold (D-WI), Nay
Feinstein (D-CA), Yea
Graham (R-SC), Yea
Grassley (R-IA), Yea
Gregg (R-NH), Yea
Hagel (R-NE), Yea
Harkin (D-IA), Nay
Hatch (R-UT), Yea
Hutchison (R-TX), Yea
Inhofe (R-OK), Yea
Inouye (D-HI), Nay
Isakson (R-GA), Yea
Johnson (D-SD), Yea
Kennedy (D-MA), Nay
Kerry (D-MA), Nay
Klobuchar (D-MN), Yea
Kohl (D-WI), Yea
Kyl (R-AZ), Yea
Landrieu (D-LA), Yea
Lautenberg (D-NJ), Nay
Leahy (D-VT), Yea
Levin (D-MI), Nay
Lieberman (ID-CT), Yea
Lincoln (D-AR), Yea
Lott (R-MS), Yea
Lugar (R-IN), Yea
Martinez (R-FL), Yea
McCain (R-AZ), Yea
McCaskill (D-MO), Yea
McConnell (R-KY), Yea
Menendez (D-NJ), Nay
Mikulski (D-MD), Yea
Murkowski (R-AK), Yea
Murray (D-WA), Nay
Nelson (D-FL), Yea
Nelson (D-NE), Yea
Obama (D-IL), Not Voting
Pryor (D-AR), Yea
Reed (D-RI), Nay
Reid (D-NV), Nay
Roberts (R-KS), Yea
Rockefeller (D-WV), Nay
Salazar (D-CO), Yea
Sanders (I-VT), Nay
Schumer (D-NY), Nay
Sessions (R-AL), Yea
Shelby (R-AL), Yea
Smith (R-OR), Yea
Snowe (R-ME), Yea
Specter (R-PA), Yea
Stabenow (D-MI), Nay
Stevens (R-AK), Yea
Sununu (R-NH), Yea
Tester (D-MT), Yea
Thune (R-SD), Yea
Vitter (R-LA), Yea
Voinovich (R-OH), Yea
Warner (R-VA), Yea
Webb (D-VA), Yea
Whitehouse (D-RI), Nay
Wyden (D-OR), Nay

What this shows, quite simply, is a lack of simple decency on the part of liberal Democrats. Absurdly self-righteous about their concern for the poor, blacks, human rights and a host of other nice-sounding generalities, they happily accept smears directed toward people who disagree with their political agenda.

When you are a great believer in social justice, acting decently toward people on the other side of key issues doesn’t really seem necessary

Left Bigotry in Wisconsin

Good catch from the Badger Blog Alliance: a letter in the Baraboo paper about how evil and terrible conservatives are.

Who are the real sheep here? You are, who blindly followed this failed president into war. Sheep don’t ask why. Sheep aren’t skeptical. Sheep don’t protest. Sheep just keep their heads down.

Remember when conservatives portrayed themselves as rugged individualists? No nation building. Fiscal responsibility. Small government. Privacy. Looks like those tough guys were sheep in wolves clothing. Every single principle was thrown out the window.

What remains after we’ve sheared this Neocon sheep? A selfish, xenophobic, racist, intolerant, greedy, frightened, pitiful little creature.

Maybe somewhere deep inside his mind, he realizes he has been used. His fears have been exploited by a bunch of modern-day Machiavellis. But he’s too invested in the façade of King George. He can’t back out now. The shame would be too great. So off he goes, with the herd, braying the same old, tired talking points.

Let’s all go down to Fighting Bob Fest to see Ed Garvey, Cindy Sheehan, Matt Rothschild and many more of the most un-sheeplike people you will ever meet.

John Rausch

And to think, the folks at Fighting Bob Fest will bask in the warm glow of their own tolerant, inclusive and accepting outlook.

Christian-Bashing Democrats

From Opinion Journal, some observations on the bigoted anti-Christian rhetoric that two of the bloggers in the John Edwards campaign spewed forth, and the broader reality of the Democratic Party.

Heavens, it’s getting crowded in the pews these days--at least with Democratic presidential candidates. Here is Sen. Barack Obama in California’s Saddleback pulpit at the invitation of mega-selling pastor Rick Warren. There is Sen. Hillary Clinton with downcast eyes in Newsweek, praying before the cameras in New York’s Riverside Church. And there preaches John Edwards, also in Riverside Church, weaving his personal faith into everything from AIDS to the minimum wage. Clearly the push is on to show that, for now anyway, the Democratic hopefuls are just plain folks in the religion department.

All the more reason to plumb the curious episode of Amanda Marcotte, that blogger for the Edwards campaign who resigned on Monday and was followed out the door Tuesday by another technical consultant, Melissa McEwan. Both quit thanks to circulation by conservatives of some of these former staffers’ Internet musings. That is to say, in Ms. Marcotte’s case especially: scatological Catholic-baiting rants about “theocracy” marked by leering references to the pope and liberal use of the F-word.

So far, so unremarkable. Just being a bilious feminist with a potty mouth doesn’t much distinguish one in the blogosphere these days. What does matter is something else: We have here a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern moment, in which the fate of bit players becomes emblematic of a larger drama.

For what the blogger tempest really illuminates is a fact that could come to haunt the Democrats as they vie for national office: namely, that their past few wilderness years have also been boom years for the church-loathing liberal/left punditry. As a result, anti-Christian invective now graces (or disgraces) many of the books, magazines, Web sites and blogs to which liberals, including the Democratic elite, habitually look for ideas. One motto of this cottage industry is that the most serious threat to the American republic can be found in, no, not those religious fundamentalists, the ones that first leap to mind after 9/11; but, incredibly, certain other believers--our nation’s Christians.

The cover of Damon Linker’s 2006 “Theocons: Secular America Under Siege,” for example, declares: “For the past three decades, a few determined men have worked to inject their radical religious ideas into the nation’s politics. This is the story of how they succeeded.” Again, he is not talking about al Qaeda. Other books in a similar vein include Michelle Goldberg’s “Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism,” praised on its cover by Katha Pollitt for exposing “the ongoing takeover of our country by right-wing Christians.” There is Kevin Phillips’s “American Theocracy,” which identifies in its subtitle “radical religion” as a “peril” facing the nation. Enter also Randall Balmer’s “Thy Kingdom Come: An Evangelical’s Lament,” which opens with the unfortunate metaphorical notion that evangelical faith has been “hijacked by radical zealots” and closes with a vow about “taking America back.”

To repeat, this apocalyptic rhetoric is not being heaped on, say, bomb-toting Islamists but on your churchgoing neighbors next door. Some authors even argue that those neighbors and Islamic “fundamentalists” are joined at the hip. Mel White’s “Religion Gone Bad: The Hidden Dangers of the Christian Right” is one; he warns that Christians want to “forcibly” take back the country.

Not to be outdone is the recent tome “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America,” by New York Times reporter Chris Hedges. It delivers more of the same, studded with that tonier F-word, “fascism.” Yet despite the book’s conflation of prayer groups and jackboots, Publisher’s Weekly awarded “American Fascists” a starred review and praised its attentiveness to a supposedly “serious and growing threat to the very concept and practice of an open society.”

Of course, whatever has been hurled against Christians in books and magazines has been positively restrained by the standards of the blogosphere. Like Ms. Marcotte’s more embellished arias, a lot of blog commentary cannot be printed in a family newspaper.

Sophisticates and secularists have always titillated themselves by despising the Bible Belt. But professional Christian-bashers have never been as “embedded” in the liberal mainstream as they are today. And therein lies a problem for Democrats. More Amanda Marcottes are not what the party needs as it scrambles to re-establish its religious bona fides with wary red-staters. No wonder so many Democratic candidates are in church. Now they really have something to pray about.

The author of this piece, Mary Eberstadt, politely fails to be explicit about the vitriol that Marcotte (and McEwan) posted.

But just to give a taste of the vile stuff she posted, here is a sample.

Q: What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit?

A: You’d have to justify your misogyny with another ancient mythology.

And via Sykes Writes, Michelle Malkin does a dramatic reading of Marcotte’s rants.

People like Edwards and Hillary and Obama may not, in their hearts of hearts, be anti-Christian bigots. But they are tolerant of anti-Christian bigotry. They will accept from their supporters and campaign operatives nasty rhetoric that they would never accept if directed toward blacks or homosexuals.

A lot of Democratic operatives and pundits claim that being a Christian and voting Democratic are perfectly consistent; that any notion that the Democrats are anti-Christian is some kind of misperception.

But it’s not a misperception. The Democratic party is the party of those who hate Christians -- and those who will tolerate hatred toward Christians.