Table of Contents
For J.D. and V.V., who keep me sane
INTRODUCTION
Liberals on the Couch
What makes unhinged liberals tickand why are they so ticked off?
Theyre mad about losing the past two presidential elections. Theyre mad about losing the mainstream monopoly on how news and information are disseminated in the 21st century. Theyre mad about minority conservatives in the Republican Party. Theyre mad about patriotism, capitalism, and the War on Terrorism.
And theyre bleeping mad about being called mad. (Just ask Anger Management Poster Boy, Howard Dean.)
If ideologically biased members of the American Psychological Association werent so desperately preoccupied with proving that we conservatives are crazy, they would find a gold mine of research material waiting in the Bush-bashing enclaves of the anti-war movement, academia, and the Democrat leadership. I am not a licensed medical professional, but after compiling case study after case study, I do know this:
The American Left is unwell.
I know this from both professional and personal experienceand Im not just talking about the time MSNBC caveman Chris Matthews frothed at the mouth and kicked me off his train wreck of a show because I dared to defend the Swift Boat Veterans. Every day, my mailbox teems with seething, spiteful, and incoherent rants from left-wing crackpots who make Matthews look like a Zen master on Morphine. Granted, some of the correspondents are probably half-baked homeless people logging in from taxpayer-subsidized Internet accounts in San Francisco and Berkeley. But many are supposedly respectable students, homemakers, legal secretaries, and retirees whose hatred of President Bush and the conservative media has driven them over the edge.
How is it, you may wonder, that a reasonable Democrat mutates from quietly sporting a faded Gore-Lieberman bumper sticker on his Volvo, to bellowing across the dinner table about yellowcake (uranium, not Duncan Hines), to e-mailing profanity-laced screeds decrying Chimpy McHitlerburton!
How is it that you can take a seemingly normal person, add a dash of left-wing sanctimony, and voila, create an instant lunatic?
Many private citizens are emboldened by the shields of presumed anonymity and invincibility bestowed by the Internet. And many Democrat officials are bolstered by the smug knowledge that their sympathizers in the mainstream media will not hold them accountable for their actions. Liberal racists, for example, who insist that Hispanics, blacks, and other minorities betray their skin color if they dont embrace liberalism, almost always get a pass.
Like the hideous creature in the movie Alien, gestating in the stomach of a seemingly benign human host, the unhinged liberal feeds off the illusion of normalcy until he can no longer tolerate his artificial confines. This book is a forensic examination of the extraterrestrial creature exploding from the Democrat Partys gut. Like any good horror movie, its scary and silly at the same time. You cover your eyes, but you cant help gawking through the cracks between your fingers at the nightmarish scenes of haywire leftists on the loose.
Actually, the unhinged liberal phenomenon isnt entirely novel. The Lefts hatred of President Bush today is not all that different from its hatred of President Reagan a quarter-century ago (although Helen Thomas was somehow able to keep her anti-Republican suicidal thoughts to herself during the 1980s). And just as there are tinfoil-hat-wearers today who claim that President Bush engineered the September 11th terrorist attacks, there were crackpots two decades ago who asserted that AIDS was cooked up by government scientists.
What is new is how readily these crazy ideas are now accepted by the highest echelons of the Democrat Party and liberal establishment. And with the advent of the Internet as an engine for political activism, the radical lefts attack dog politics have only been accelerated in momentum and maximized in volume. The scariest part is, these Internet crazies arent just riding along in the Democrat bustheyre driving it.
Dems Gone Loco
You could see this clearly in the aftermath of the 2004 presidential election, when Democrats needed their heads examined.
Literally.
Waves of acute anxiety, depression, helplessness, grief, and denial spread from Hollywood to Manhattan. A few days after the election, Renana Brooks, a Washington, D.C., clinical psychologist (and Bush critic), told the Los Angeles Times: People are in absolute post-traumatic stress and total despair and pretty much believe American society is permanently destroyed. Thats what Ive been hearing all day... It looks to me like a worse trauma than 9/11.
Democrat Tony Sears broke down in an interview with the Los Angeles Times: I felt, he said, his voice cracking, like someone had died.
Countless blue-staters wallowed in victimhood as never beforeand sympathetic psychologists (many of whom confessed to being miserable Democrats themselves) pounced. The Boca Raton branch of the American Health Association was quick to capitalize on the Democratic pity party and coined a new term for liberal dyspepsia: Post-Election Selection Trauma (or PEST).
According to the AHA, PEST symptoms include:
feelings of withdrawal,
feelings of isolation,
emotional anger and bitterness,
loss of appetite,
sleeplessness,
nightmares,
pervasive moodiness, including endless sulking, and
excessive worries about the direction of the country.
The medical professionals might have added complete loss of perspective and common sense to the list. But to addled liberals on the couch, the nausea of election-induced sickness was no joke.
Mike McClure of Fort Worth, Texas, became physically sick. The day after the election, he told the Fort Worth Star Telegram, I had a stomachache... Its more than mentalits a physical drag on me.
On a website dedicated to bashing the Fox News Channel, poster Jim B. fumed: I need to see a shrink. I am losing it. I quit my job, a job I love and a boss to die for. I broke down after giving notice. I am crying almost every day. I cant snap out of it. There are deep, dark thoughts in my head.
Manhattan psychoanalyst Sherman Pheiffer told the Associated Press: My patients were incredulous, depressed, angry, very frightened... Everyone talked about feeling frightened [about] the future of this country.
In Madison, Wisconsin, area therapists were flooded with patients suffering from post-election depression, according to the Capital Times. Psychologist Suzanne Drennan was overwhelmed by the demand for counseling services and expressed shock at the number of people affected by the Democrats loss. Ive never had an experience like this before. Never. Never. Never, she told the Capital Times. Temporarily forgetting the admonition, Physician, heal thyself, psychologist Roger Garms told the newspaper he shared his patients pain: Im too depressed myself to speak about it.
Heartbroken in Des Moines
Karen Emmerson, a 20-year-old University of Iowa student, president of the College Democrats, and campaign volunteer for the John Kerry presidential campaign, was heartbroken. She told the
