The cult of hatred and rage and slime

Watching Sandra Bernhard choking on her own rage in an out-of-control explosion of profanity-laced bile (see posting below), inexplicably described by some Obama-leaning bloggers and other writers as "humor", reinforced what has been becoming clearer and clearer to me for months: the core of the Obama cult has simply lost its senses and all grasp of basic human decency.

I'm not talking about the kind of emotionally-charged tactics that always happens in politics, the denunciations and accusations and "swift-boating" and even outright lying. Such stuff isn't pretty, but it's normal. It's been around for as long as politics has existed.

I'm talking about the unprecedented torrent of hatred and rage and slime pouring from a large contingent of Obama supporters -- not from his campaign, but from supporters -- directed against first Hillary Clinton and then Sarah Palin, and against people who support them.

I'm talking about the protracted campaign of insults and smears documented in posting after posting on Cannonfire, to which I've repeatedly linked, and familiar to anyone who regularly reads PUMA sites and sees the pro-Obama comments there. I'm talking about weird, pornographic (in the worst sense) public obsessing and fantasizing over details of these female politicians' reproduc-tive processes, like Andrew Sullivan spending days picking over every possible aspect of Palin's having had amniocentesis, as if this had anything on Earth to do with her qualifications to be Vice President. I'm talking about comparing Palin to a character in a novel "who holds you down while they fuck you". About eruptions of bizarre, incoherent, inexplicable rage. About depicting a family as incestuous in the guise of satire. Public airing of McCain/Palin pornographic fantasies. Sweaty, drooling speculations that Palin's new baby might actually be her daughter's.

That's what a major faction of the party I supported has become. Sniggering frat boys gawking up a 17-year-old girl's dress.

Examples could be multiplied endlessly; everyone who has been paying serious attention knows how pervasive this stuff has been. (This site offers pages upon pages of anti-Palin cases.)

I'm 47 and I've been taking an interest in political campaigns since I've been old enough to vote, but I have never seen anything like this. Even in the current campaign, I haven't seen anything like it coming from the pro-Clinton camp or from the Republicans. It's been coming only from the pro-Obama camp.

Even McCain himself -- the actual Republican standard-bearer, remember -- hasn't been targeted in this way. He's been fiercely criticized for his positions on issues, and insulted because of his age, but as I said above, this is really "normal" politics. The weird sexualized filth, the choking fury and disdain, have been directed almost exclusively at Clinton and Palin (though after the primaries I did start to see a bit of this being aimed at Cindy McCain, before Palin came along and presented another target).

The people who write this stuff seem utterly unable to grasp the point that it cannot in any way be considered helpful to Obama, and indeed may even be harming him, by associating him in the minds of the voters with those of his supporters who produce it. Reading their sites, it's obvious why. They can't see this, or engage in any other kind of normal introspection about what they are doing, because they are blinded by their own hatred. They are so filled with hatred and rage toward their targets that those targets are no longer real human beings to them, but personifications of evil, for whom no amount of vilification or degradation could ever be enough.

Regardless of what you think of Clinton or Palin as politicians, this is a dangerous and disturbing frame of mind for large numbers of people to be in.

The targeting of Clinton and Palin obviously suggests that gender has something to do with it. But there are just as many women as men caught up in the furious hate-and-slime slinging, so there is something more going on than just males becoming agitated about females rising to power -- though I suspect that that feeling does play something of a role. (I think that certain aspects of female chimpanzee psychology offer hints about what might be going on under the surface, but that point is too complex to explore here. Maybe in another posting.)

And there are others -- people who aren't haters themselves, but are enablers, making excuses for the filth and trying to normalize it or trivialize it.

Has this always been down there somewhere, like the writhing stuff one sees when one turns over a big rock, and we just never knew about it until the internet became pervasive enough for it to explode out from under that rock and contaminate our national political discourse? Or is it just a form of mass insanity which has recently engulfed a certain hard core of Obama cultists?

I hope it's the latter, because it implies that in the long run most of these people will return to their senses. And I see real grounds for believing that this is the case. Some of the people who have been doing this stuff are people I "knew" on a mutual-blog-reading basis before they became caught up in the hatred. Back then, they were normal, decent people. If something transformed them into their own evil twins, what was transformed can be transformed back.

One thing I do know -- if the Democrats win this election, the slime-mongers will consider their tactics vindicated and justified. They will have no reason to change, and this sick mentality will become almost impossible to uproot from the Democratic party. The Republicans will become the only major party that people with a normal sense of decency can support. That's not a corner I'm willing to see us paint ourselves into. The Democratic party must lose this election, so that it can be saved from the demons possessing it.