It's no secret that this country is more polarized than ever. Quite frankly I don't believe there is any so-called middle anymore even as presidential candidates in both parties portend to be speaking for it. And I have proof!

Check out this LA Times article.

Previous psychological studies have found that conservatives tend to be more structured and persistent in their judgments whereas liberals are more open to new experiences. The latest study found those traits are not confined to political situations but also influence everyday decisions.

Okay, our brains work differently. But do our hearts? I get the pull yourself up by your bootstraps mentality. But what if you don't even have boots? And therein lies the rub. Does one deserve help in obtaining boots or to move this to an actual debate, does one deserve help paying for health insurance?

The Children's Health Initiative Program is up for refunding. The dems want to expand as a first step toward getting health care for all. The pubs do not want to expand the program and would be just as happy doing away with it because they fear it is leading us down the path to socialized medicine. How's that for simplifying the whole dang thing?

So in an effort to put a face to the CHIP program, a family in Baltimore who benefits from the program took the risk to allow themselves to become poster children for the dems. Now they are being attacked by the right. Wait, no, the right is asking reasonable questions about whether this family should receive financial help. Which is it?

Unfortunately, I think that a picture of them in a previous Baltimore Sun article may have helped spur this investigation. I must admit when I saw the family in their Butchers Hill kitchen, I had a moment of pause when I saw the nice cabinets and granite countertops. I don't have granite countertops! How could they possibly need financial assistance? Then I realized, hell. This program is NOT medicaid. It is for the working poor and this guy is a woodworker! And, um, who am I to judge. They qualified for a program that the right considers a handout and the left considers a hand-up.

Here is today's Baltimore Sun's take on it all. Today's article includes a more modest picture of their small rowhouse.

So what is one to make of this bruhahah? It seems to have began when right wing bloggers started dissecting the Frost family and their assets.

Here is actually what one of the bloggers, Michelle Malkin, is saying.

Democrat poster-child abuse, the nutroots’ pushback, and the continued campaign to silence the Right

Okay. So the lefties are thugs. Guess what, the lefties are calling the righties thugs too! Check out this post on the progressive blog dailykos.com

A Movement of Petty Thugs by Hunter

Tue Oct 09, 2007 at 08:34:48 PM PDT

Ya know, I've been following what Malkin, Free Republic, Riehl and the like have been doing to Graeme Frost's family. I can't post much of anything on it, because any honest, no-holds-barred post I write about it right now would probably get me arrested. It's one of those little things about living in a civilized society -- sometimes you have to know where the boundaries are. And yet, there are continual examples of other people that don't have any boundaries at all.

Right now, the Frost's home address is posted on Free Republic. And it's been there for gawd knows how long -- nobody's taking it down. Why would they? The kid is the latest enemy of the entire conservative movement: they want to make him pay.

No, we've been through all this before, and we'll no doubt go through it again; if someone at any point so much as sends Malkin a nasty email, she writes an entire outraged self-ego-humping book about it. Someone calls out O'Reilly for a statement of appalling and unapologetic bigotry, he goes into seizures of anti-entire-planet rage. And God forbid someone dares make a schoolyard play off of an Army general's name -- the entire conservative movement freaks out and wet their goddamn pants in unison about the fucking horror of it all. But going after a kid and his family, because he read a statement on the radio? Fair. Fucking. Game. Hey, the twelve year old is an enemy. Get him.

I seem to recall spending a whole evening watching for and purging Malkin's home address from comments, the last time the righties pulled something like this, so that she wouldn't get the exact kind of stalking that the righties are now celebrating gleefully, again... but from their end, it's all good. That kid had the audacity to express a political agenda, and so he, his parents and his family must be destroyed. It's as simple as that.

No words will do. Eternal assboil Limbaugh, Canadian carpetbagger Steyn, obliviously self-unaware anchor baby Malkin -- yep, they're right. The twelve year old is "fair game", because he's a political opponent. So send the entire right-wing hate machine after him. Internet, hate radio, "pundits" -- the whole movement. That's all any of them are good for anyway. That's all they ever are good for.

There aren't any words to express what I really think about these shambling dermoid cysts dressing themselves up as humans. I certainly hope, in the back corners of my mind, that one or more of them gets accidentally hit by a runaway beer truck, or dissolved in cartoon-strength acid, or slowly eaten by a bear while having to listen to intellectual half-fart Jonah Goldberg read some of his worst goddamn grade-school-level columns aloud the whole time. That'd be a start: we could go from there, anyway, in our efforts to imagine some small measure of karmic retribution for the malevolence these people celebrate every day.

These people think the premise of not doing the worst possible thing to even the smallest political enemy at every possible opportunity would be nothing but an act of weakness. God help them and me both, but I sincerely hope they someday find themselves on the receiving end of the same treatment. They lack all semblances of human empathy: like exceptionally vicious and stupid dogs, punishment in-kind would be the only way they would ever learn. No, that is not true -- dogs do learn from kindness. In the entire animal kingdom, only conservatives do not.

It's long past time for people to stop treating Fox-style, Malkin-style, Limbaugh-style conservatism as merely a "political" phenomenon. It may once have been, but it isn't now. As of this millennium, it's nothing but a hate movement with neckties. Protofascism with bright, patriotic logos. Stop treating it with anything but revulsion and disdain. Stop pretending for even a bare moment that they are anything more than thugs.

So who are the real thugs? Will they please stand up? I have to admit my politics go far left. But to wish some of the right wing nut jobs get hit by a beer truck? In saying that doesn't that make me no better than them? Doesn't that make me a thug?

The right wing seems to have moved from AM radio to the blogosphere. Welcome.

But in this post-Dredge Report era of semi-newsies blogging without the checks and balances of true journalism, we will continue to have the likes of FOX News Michelle Malkin's and Daily Kos's Michael Lazzaro (Hunter) feeding the flames. I just wish those flames emanated more from unified heart than a bi-polar brain.

# posted by Susan @ 9:58 AM