All I can say is: I felt like I'd stumbled into the "Two Minutes Hate" from George Orwell's 1984, in which images of enemy leaders are projected on a screen and everyone in the auditorium must spend 120 seconds screaming angrily at the top of their lungs. I've seen some fairly biting pieces and comments on conservative political blogs in the past, but nothing with the kind of visceral hatred I saw at the Daily Kos. What was it about this plain old mother of five from Alaska, I wondered, that could inspire this kind of a reaction?
Jeff Bell is up with an excellent piece discussing this question. As usual, his insights far surpass anything I could have come up with. He sees the Left's reaction as rooted in values reaching back to 1789:
The most important thing to know about the left today is that it is centered on social issues. At root, it always has been, ever since the movement took form and received its name in the revolutionary Paris of the 1790s. In order to drive toward a vision of true human liberation, all the institutions and moral codes we associate with civilization had to be torn down. The institutions targeted in revolutionary France included the monarchy and the nobility, but even higher on the enemies list of the Jacobins and their allies were organized religion and the family, institutions in which the moral values of traditional society could be preserved and passed on outside the control of the leftist vanguard.
The analysis goes on from there, and gives among the most insightful looks into the culture of the Left, and its goals and values, that I've read in some time. The final paragraph ties all of this back to Sarah Palin, and what she represents to those steeped in the culture and values of the contemporary Left. I won't spoil it here; you can follow this link to read the whole piece.
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