"Insane Rage" Among Obamaphiles?

Over at the Corner...well, they don't seem to be getting any better. Ducking in over there really does feel a bit like peeking into a parallel Earth.

I mean, I don't think it's a big secret that the folks at the National Review aren't exactly the sharpest tools in the shed. Look, we're talking about a magazine of political analysis with Jonah Goldberg on its staff. High octane they ain't.

So that's no secret.

As is so often the case, however, it's not their lack of intellectual firepower that's their most glaring weakness. It is, rather, that they fail to use what God did give 'em to good effect. They make, so far as I can tell, virtually no effort at all to be objective. They know ahead of time that their ultimate conclusion must always be either 'conservatives rule' or 'liberals suck'--the only question is how to cobble together a chain of argument to get where they want to go.

Their latest project: gerrymandering cases for a couple of different theses without ever formulating them very clearly. These theses seem to be, roughly:

The Equal Anger Thesis:
There are currently roughly equivalent amounts of irrational anger on the American right and left
and
The Equal Culpability Thesis:
McCain and Palin are no more responsible for the anger among their supporters than Obama and Biden are responsible for that among theirs.

The ECT is clearly a joke, and it's probably not worthy of any attention at all. It is, of course, always possible to say anything one wants--but there is no doubt that McCain and (especially) Palin have done far more to instill anger in their followers. It is difficult to believe that anyone who is paying attention could honestly accept the ECT, and I don't think they even really believe it over at the Corner. They may half-believe it or something like that...but they're probably just defending it because they in some sense have to, and because it's easy to throw up a false-equivalence smokescreen in such cases.

The Equal Anger Thesis could be true, I suppose, though it doesn't cohere with the evidence I've seen. Mark Steyn points us here...but that turns out to be Michelle Malkin...not promising, of course, if it's sound reasons you're looking for...

Now, Malkin's collected some pretty disgusting stuff...but little of it seems to be to the point. First, much of it is about George Bush, not McCain or Palin. Bush has been in office for eight years, and has been perhaps the worst president of all time. He's done many genuinely awful things. A certain degree of hatred toward Bush is probably rationally defensible--or at least excusable--and certainly cannot be compared to the virtually groundless hatred of Obama, who has not even been president yet and has committed no crimes comparable to Bush's.

Second, she has mined the internet for this stuff, and we know what lives there. The charges against McCain supporters concerned overt public behavior over the last week or so. Even if eight years worth of material from the intertubes can balance this out in some way, it's irrelevant. The relevant comparison class is: public actions of Obama supporters over the last week or so. If we get to mine the internet for anti-Obama stuff, too, then the balance of anger will pretty much certainly shift back to the right.

Finally, much of the anger that does exist on our side seems clearly to be a reaction to the vitriol emanating from the right. Anger in response to unjustified anger is not necessarily unjustified.

So, though I'm wary of my bias in this case, I don't see that the Malkin/Corner complex has made its case.