I was watching a little O'Reilly tonight and saw Alan Colmes was on to defend the indefensible on the question of why politics is so polarized under Obama's 'rule'.

Monica Crowley simply said the obvious--a President that campaigned on a new kind of politics has proven to be the more partisan and divisive political figure in living memory and Americans are justifiably upset about it.

Alan Colmes opined that the Tea Party is simply a manifestation of racism.

Nothing too surprising in that except perhaps in my own reaction--I wasn't angry or upset. I didn't grit my teeth at the insult.

I laughed.

Colmes clearly had no answer, no way of spinning massive public disaffection with Obama and the Democrats. His charge of racism was a "your mother wears army boots" retort--distinctly inelegant, ineffective and ill-conceived.

To make matters worse, he had to admit that there was absolutely no way he could know this, suggesting rather lamely, that no one was going to come right out and say they were racist--a classic rhetoric fallacy along the lines of "when did you stop beating your wife?

I actually felt sorry for Alan Colmes, his beta-maleness exposed like Don Knotts doing a Tarzan yell. His job is to go out and take a beating, to be humiliated in place of his betters within the Democrat establishment.

It doesn't get more girly-man than that...

UPDATE: I'm happy to have rediscovered Richard Fernandez and the Belmont Club after a long estrangement. You would do well to read this whole post.

Who makes monsters? Mostly the Left: because of its huge presence in the media and the arts, the Left has traditionally manufactured the most hate-objects. They’ve done it for so long that it has become almost a birthright. The photographer Zombie has documented dozens of calls from the left, from demonstrators to celebrities, for the assassination and murder of President George W. Bush. But that’s not a crime, is it? “Threats to the president aren’t excusable now, and weren’t excusable in the past — and yet death threats against Bush at protests seem to have been routinely ignored for years (and readers who have any evidence showing that the threateners depicted below [in the Zombie post] were ever prosecuted for threatening the president, please tell me and I’ll update this essay with the new info). Why the discrepancy?”

The discrepancy is probably because the Left has long appointed itself the guardian of the freak-minting industry. It is a prerogative that is jealously guarded. Thus Glenn Reynolds could receive this insulting email calling for civility without the slightest irony. “I cannot emphasize this enough: your brand of public discourse is hurting our country. It us poison. So fuck you, you GOP utensil, and fuck your mother for bringing you forth.” Get it Glenn? So too could Ann Coulter be threatened by protesters at the University of Ottawa to prevent her from making a “hate speech.” S**t flows downhill. There is no mystery to that. It’s Leftist physics.