Michael van der Galien: Delusional

I'm trying not to harp on the nuttiness on the right these days, but this was just too irritating to pass up. One Michael van der Galien insisting that conservatives have handled the election and its results with grace, and that "...the tone of most conservatives was polite, calm, steady." He claims that this contrasts markedly with liberals' reactions in 2000 and 2004.

Now, these things are fairly difficult to compare, especially when you've got a dog in the fight, but...well...this is pretty clearly just flat-out delusional.

First, in each of these elections, the right was more vicious than the left. The right engaged in concerted campaigns of character assassination against Gore, Kerry and Obama. Gore was a pathological liar; Kerry was swiftboated; Obama was a socialist, a Marxist, a Muslim Manchirian candidate, even the Antichrist.

Second, there was no comparison between the elections of 2000 and 2004 on the one hand and 2008 on the other. In 2000, the Bush camp exhibited a willingness to steal the election by preventing the votes from being counted, flying in crowds of protesters and ultimately taking their anti-recall case to the Supreme Court. Republicans in the Florida state legislature even claimed that they would elect a slate of Republican electors even if Democrats did win a recount. By 20004, we'd already suffered through the quasi-coup of 2000 and the mendacious case for invading Iraq. Bush had run an almost unbelievably divisive and incompetent administration. So it would be undertstandable for liberals to be angry about the elections of 2000 and 2004. On the other hand, after eight years of an incompetent Bush administration and a basically clean and honest Obama campaign, there is little excuse for anger on the part of conservatives now. And yet:

Third, there has, still, been more anger and irrationality coming from the right in 2008 than came from the left in 2000 or 2004.

and, of course:

Fourth: in addition to being more angry and irrational than liberals over the time period in question, conservatives have also, over the same time period, insisted that it was liberals who behaved more reprehensibly.

Now, it's probably impossible to convince conservatives like Mr. van der Galien of the facts, but that doesn't mean that we should just let their BS pass without comment.