Taking the gloves off

Run, don't walk, to this post from Digby who reminds us that the brutish slime machine that calls itself the Republican party is really nothing new.

As we think about the relentlessness of the Republican machine and its propensity for playing hardball, it pays sometimes to remember that their ruthless tactics are actually a matter of temperament rather than ideology. Conservatives have always been this way. The problem today is that they are operating with a radical agenda, an incompetent president and a country with much too much power to be allowed to run wild with either.

He quotes extensively, in fact, from a powerful essay by William Hazlit, written in 1820, about the tendency of conservatives to attack the jugular, while liberals can't quite bring themselves to hammer back with equal intensity. For liberals, politics are about principles, for conservatives, politics are personal.
That explains something that liberals have been baffled about for the past two years -- they look at the Right and think, "These guys own all three branches of the federal government and a majority of the statehouses. Why are they still so goddamned angry?"

Conservatives are angry at anything that threatens their personal hold on power. It's why a Zell Miller can spit that running a candidate in opposition to Bush during wartime is the moral equivalent of treason.

Liberals must get over their highmindedness. As Hazlitt writes, "They betray the cause by not defending it as it is attacked, tooth and nail, might and main, without exception and without remorse."