I usually find what Michelle Goldberg has to say admirable or at least interesting, but this is just inexcusable.
See if you can spot the exact moment at which I said out loud, "You have got to be f*cking kidding me!"
How the Left Learned to Hate Like the Right
...
One hundred days into his administration, President Trump has few legislative achievements to his name. But he has forced liberals to experience the near-apocalyptic revulsion that conservatives have often felt toward Democratic presidents. In doing so, he has unwittingly created a new movement in American politics, as Democrats channel the sort of all-encompassing outrage that has long fueled grass-roots conservatism.
...
Objectively, there’s no comparison between the conservative demonization of Mr. Obama and the progressive case against Mr. Trump. People on the right saw Mr. Obama as a Kenyan-born secret Muslim with a hidden agenda to hobble American power and a health care reform plan to establish "death panels." None of that is true.
People on the left believe that Mr. Trump has incited hatred against minorities, and boasted about grabbing women by their genitals. Democrats think that the president and his family are blatantly profiting off the presidency and that he welcomed the help of a hostile foreign power during the election. All this is grounded in fact.
Wait for it...
Wait for it...
Facts aside, there is an emotional symmetry between the conservative reaction to past Democratic presidents and the liberal response to Mr. Trump.
Bingo.
Right there.
Suddenly, left-of-center people get what it’s like to have a president who is the living negation of all they value, a president who makes them ashamed before their children and terrified for their future.
Apparently Ms. Goldberg slept through the entire George W. Bush administration. Which must have taken some doing since the country got pretty loud during those eight years.
So since she is apparently unfamiliar with American history before January 2009. I will try to explain to her why what she wrote is ridiculous. And happily the explanation is actually pretty simple!
All you have to do, Michelle, is get up and look out your window. Right now. Go ahead. We'll wait.
I'll bet one of the very first things you notice about what you see outside your window is that we do not, in fact, live in North Korea.
Which means that is no State Affairs Commission of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea forcing the tens of millions of bigots and imbeciles who fervently believed (and still believe) every single lie they heard about President Obama and who fervently believe all the lies President Stupid tells them every day to keep listening to the liars who have been lying to them for the last 25 years.
Seriously. Michelle. They are absolutely free to change the channel anytime they want to. They can click on some "news" source other than Breitbart or World Net Daily or Newsmax or InfoWars anytime they want to. No one is putting a gun to their heads and making them watch Fox News night after night. No one compels them go right on letting Rush Limbaugh and his dozens of imitators to take a dump in their skulls every day, year after year after year -- long after anyone who was not fundamentally f*cked-in-the-head would have caught on to the scam.
And these lies they tell themselves? These crackpot conspiracies they pass around to each other like so much circle-jerk hate-porn? They're such goddamn stupid lies. They're ridiculous lies. And they blow up in their stunned, cow-dumb faces every single time.
So what do they do when the one-hundredth racist Hate Radio fairy tale they've taken as gospel is debunked for the one-hundredth time and falls apart right in front of them for the one-hundredth time?
Well that's the worst part of all. because their reactions are inevitably so tediously, sickeningly predictable. First, they flail, shouting anything and everything they can think of to keep the two beasts they fear most in this world -- Reality and Accountability -- at bay. Then they run in circles shrieking "Yeah, well, Libtards are just as bad!" (Which is why Both Siderism is the worst lie of all.) And, inevitably, they end up belly-crawling right back to the same con men and demagogues who have been lying to them all along to eagerly collect their one-hundred-and-first dose reality-abolishing, Hannity-approved bullshite.
What I sincerely hope we on the Left have finally learned right down to the bone is that it is pointless to try to reason with them, because their political party is not a political party at all. It is a cult. And their ideology is not an ideology. It is a dissociative disorder.
You see, I have no doubt that Republicans sincerely believe the noxious claptrap they believe every bit as passionately as Alexander Stephenssincerely believed that blacks were created by God serve the white race, or that Magda Goebbelssincerely believed that her children were better off dead than living in a world without the Nazi Party.
I just don't care.
What I care about is finding the most efficient way of ending the threat to my country posed by this mob of brainwashed, racist imbeciles.
