Neptunus Lex

Having spent the last seven and one half years stuck at the one minute mark of a two-minutes hate, elements of the left-leaning cultural elite have finally realized that it’s pretty hard to put the Hate-Brand^¬© toothpaste back in the tube. Paul Krugman roots around in the closet to find a Nixon fright mask with which to scare the chillren:

The nation, (Adlai Stevenson) warned, was in danger of becoming ‚Äúa land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win. This is Nixonland…‚Äù

The bitterness of the fight for the Democratic nomination is, on the face of it, bizarre. Both candidates still standing are smart and appealing. Both have progressive agendas (although I believe that Hillary Clinton is more serious about achieving universal health care, and that Barack Obama has staked out positions that will undermine his own efforts). Both have broad support among the party’s grass roots and are favorably viewed by Democratic voters.

Supporters of each candidate should have no trouble rallying behind the other if he or she gets the nod.

Why, then, is there so much venom out there?

I won’t try for fake evenhandedness here: most of the venom I see is coming from supporters of Mr. Obama, who want their hero or nobody.

In the same newspaper a day earlier, Frank Rich skips right past Krugman’s sine qua non universal health care Litmus Test of True Progressivism to point out that venom might in fact be the best antidote to sleaze if principles are to matter. Having deconstructed HRH’s recent Potemkin Village on the Hallmark Channel, Rich illuminates the enduring risks the Clinton camp runs in dividing by race a party painstakingly built upon a coalition of identity groups:

Last month a Hispanic pollster employed by the Clinton campaign pitted the two groups against each other by telling The New Yorker that Hispanic voters have “not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.” Mrs. Clinton then seconded the motion by telling Tim Russert in a debate that her pollster was “making a historical statement.”

It wasn’t an accurate statement, historical or otherwise. It was a lie, and a bigoted lie at that, given that it branded Hispanics, a group as heterogeneous as any other, as monolithic racists. As the columnist Gregory Rodriguez pointed out in The Los Angeles Times, all three black members of Congress in that city won in heavily Latino districts; black mayors as various as David Dinkins in New York in the 1980s and Ron Kirk in Dallas in the 1990s received more than 70 percent of the Hispanic vote. The real point of the Clinton campaign’s decision to sow misinformation and racial division, Mr. Rodriguez concluded, was to “undermine one of Obama’s central selling points, that he can build bridges and unite Americans of all types.”

Getting the hate genie back in the bottle won’t be easy for those who have profited from stirring riotous passions in their partisans. Inflammatory excess must have certainly been intoxicating when targeted against Bu$hitler Regime That is Shredding the Constitution. By Lying. But intoxication can be habit forming, and it appears now that at least some on the left are realizing that like many a drunk before, they have gone to bed with Marilyn only to wake up next to Maryscott.