That's the closest I dare to go to the title I'd really want to give this post. When you learn that I will heavily lean on Orcinus you may guess what changes my fingers are itching to make. But I'm a lady goddess. I will not stoop to conquer. No.
The exam question for today: Contrast and compare the two types of political anger in the United States. Explain why wingnut anger is harmless and light-hearted fun. Then explain why moonbat anger is treasonous.
I always fail that, and the four-eyed professor inside my head tut-tuts and sends me back to the library stacks. There I study Ann Coulter to learn how it is done delicately and ladylikely:
Democrats have declared war against Republicans, and Republicans are wandering around like a bunch of ninny Neville Chamberlains, congratulating themselves on their excellent behavior. They'll have some terrific stories about their Gandhi-like passivity to share while sitting in cells at Guantanamo after Hillary is elected.
[...]
Patriotic Americans don't have to become dangerous psychotics like liberals, but they could at least act like men.
Why hasn't the former spokesman for the Taliban matriculating at Yale been beaten even more senseless than he already is? According to Hollywood, this nation is a cauldron of ethnic hatreds positively brimming with violent skinheads. Where are the skinheads when you need them? What does a girl have to do to get an angry, club- and torch-wielding mob on its feet?
How does she do it without upsetting anyone? She is something, isn't she? Though I notice that only men can be patriotic Americans.
If I tried to be funny in such a delicious manner I'd soon be quoted as a prime example of liberal rage on the front page of the Washington Post (now there's an idea...), and at least a few wingnut bloggers would use me as the dire warning of what happens to women who get infected by feminism: they get coarse. But not our Ann, it seems. Well, of course she is against feminism. She's more in the "I've got mine" school of social thought. Or in the "hit 'em with baseball bats" school of thought.
Orcinus explains why all this is a little bit more serious than I'd like to hear:
I warned a little while back that one of the real differences between movement conservatism and fascism is that the former "does not yet rely on physical violence and campaigns of gross intimidation to obtain power and suppress opposition."
If Ann Coulter -- who has a predilection for seeing her "outrageous" remarks become standard right-wing talking points -- has her way, that difference will soon disappear. All that will be necessary is for those young, heterosexual, "manly" conservatives to start following her advice, and proving their "manhood" in the only way they know how.
It's a neat little packet. The left is unhinged in its anger so the right must start beating the left up. I'm never as funny as that, sob. It's because I'm unhinged, probably, and you need to be really well hinged to do as much flapping in the wind as Coulter does.
I have yet another tentative answer to the exam question I set at the beginning of this post: The anger of the right is unimportant because the right is always angry, ready to kick butt and to kill foreigners. We expect that. But the left is supposed to take opium and offer you the poppies that produced it. And to copulate. The left is not supposed to kick butt. So when we drugged moonbats get all angry the basic balance of the world tips and the media must write about this worrying new development. That Coulter tries to egg her supporters into a murderous rage is the same old hat. We've been hearing variations of that for the last ten years or so.
I bet that's a wrong answer, too. The correct answer has something to do with whom you are threatening with your anger. Coulter's anger is directed at people without power so it's safe.