re: #364 ShanghaiEd

Al Gore gets mentioned 100 times more often than God, where climate is concerned. A mystery.

It is odd.

We joke about BDS, but it isn’t a joke; there are people who hated Bush and still do.
It’s been little noticed that there’s been a similar phenomena of blind hate on the fringe right, directed, oddly, at John Kerry and Al Gore.

I say ‘oddly’ because these guys didn’t even win their respective elections for POTUS. So why is there still so much hate for them, and why does it seem to have such a personal quality? Not a day goes by that I don’t see some sneering reference to Kerry somewhere in the blogosphere, usually about the Swift Boat Vets story. It’s been how many years now? Yet it would take me about one minute to find someone on a place like HA or Free Republic talking about him in ways that suggest he murdered the poster’s puppy and then ate it.

Same with Gore. He kept a fairly low profile right after 2000. Inconvenient truth didn’t even come out til 2006. But in between there was still the constant jokes about him being a liar, having invented the Internet, needing advice from Naomi Wolf about what to wear…It was endless.

I suspect that the rabid partisanship during the Clinton years and the Lewinsky witchhunt are to blame. A lot of rage was cranked up back then, and it seems to have become a perpetual motion machine for the fringe right: the need to identify and attack, attack, attack the enemy, forever.

I’ve been rereading Hofstader’s 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style In American Politics” today; still timely.