"Racist Rednecks": What the Radical Left Thinks of You

Check out Janeane Garofalo's ugly but representative leftist rant against the great outpouring of democractic action by hundreds of thousands of Americans excercising their First Amendment rights to protest the policies of the Barack Obama administration:

Let's be very honest about what this is about. It's not about bashing Democrats. It's not about taxes, they have no idea what the Boston Tea Party was about. They don't know their history at all. This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up. That is nothing but a bunch of teabagging rednecks ... The limbic brain inside a right-winger or a Republican or a conservative or your average white power activist, the limbic brain is much larger in their, in their head space than in a reasonable person and it's pushing against the frontal lobe, so their synapses are misfiring ... it is, it is a neurological problem that we're dealing with.

Pretty unreal, but not unlike anything we normally hear from the likes of Glenn Greenwald, Jane Hamsher, Perez Hilton, Steve Hynd, Markos Moulitsas, Pam Spaulding, TRex, Andrew Sullivan, Matthew Yglesias, or ... well, the list goes on.

Janeane Garofalo's a classic spokesperson for the ignorance and intolerance that just oozes from the warped depths of the nation's secular progressive redoubts. And look at Keith Olbermann just lapping it up!

It's amazing, too. As Byron York notes today:

These should be happy times for liberals and the Democratic party as a whole. They control the White House and both houses of Congress, while opposition Republicans are leaderless and lost. So why do some Democrats, particularly those farther to the left, appear so angry?

If you doubt it, just watch a few minutes of MSNBC, where the recent nationwide series of "tea parties" to protest federal spending and taxes set off an angry, almost manic response. The most telling came on Keith Olbermann's program, during which the actress Janeane Garofalo, who plays an FBI computer geek on “24,” denounced the tea parties as "racism straight up."

"Let's be very honest about what this is about," Garofalo said. "It's not about bashing Democrats. It's not about taxes…This is about hating a black man in the White House."

Garofalo linked the tea parties to what she described as a peculiar feature of the conservative brain. "The limbic brain inside a right-winger, or Republican, or conservative, or your average white power activist -- the limbic brain is much larger in their head space than in a reasonable person," she explained. "And it is pushing against the frontal lobe. So their synapses are misfiring." (The limbic brain is the deep portion of the brain that mediates, controls and expresses emotion.)

Now, it's possible Garofalo was joking; she used to do comedy. But she didn't seem to be joking, and her comments were consistent with a long and dishonorable history of attributing political conservatism to mental abnormality. And as she spoke about the alleged anger on the right, Garofalo herself seemed visibly angry. Why were she, and Olbermann, and many others on the left, so apparently troubled by a virtually powerless opposition?

I asked William Anderson, a friend who is a political conservative, a medical doctor, and a lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard. "They are angry, but I think they are also scared, and I think it's because they have a sense that their triumph is a precarious one," Anderson told me. Democrats won in 2008 in some part because of the cycles of American politics; Republicans were exhausted and it was the other party's turn. Now, having won, they are unsure of how long victory will last.

"They see that they have a very small window of opportunity to do all the things they want," Anderson continued. "They see the window of opportunity as small because they know in their deepest hearts that the vast majority of the American people wouldn't go for all of the things they want to do." So they are frantic to do as much as possible before the opposition coalesces. And the tea parties might be the beginning of that coalescence.

Then there is the question of self-image. Watching Garofalo and Olbermann discuss the tea parties, it was impossible to avoid the sense that they saw themselves as two good people talking about many bad people. "One of the things about narcissism is that it looks like people who are just proud of themselves and smug, but in fact narcissism is a very brittle and unstable state," Anderson told me. "People who are deeply invested in narcissism spend an awful lot of energy trying to maintain the illusion they have of themselves as being powerful and good, and they are exquisitely sensitive to anything that might prick that balloon."

Again, the tea parties could represent a threat. What if the protesters weren't racists, weren't violent, weren't mentally defective? What if their point was legitimate, or even partly legitimate? Those are questions better batted down than answered.

Finally, there is the sense of anxiety and fragility that stems from the liberals' newly-won power. They control everything in government, and some fear what the responsibility of governing is doing to them.

There's more at the link.

It's of course always de rigeur for leftists to blow off folks like Jeneane Garafalo as anomolies. But look at Olbermann again. The guy's just nodding in total agreement, asking Garofalo, "what can we do about this," in a casual Joseph Goebbels sort of way.

Note, for example, the comments from "Tim" on my earlier post on Carrie Prejean: "Donald only adds fuel to the fire as he trolls for negative comments about those who make uh, negative comments based on fear and ignorance."

Actually, those "negative comments" constitute the bulk of the left's repertoire. But check back here later for Tim's cockamamie dismissal of Jeneane Garofalo's representive scourging of everday Americans as "racist rednecks." It's all just the fruits of extensive trolling for "negative comments."

Yeah. Right.

See also, Protein Wisdom, "'In time of victory, why is the left so angry?'"