The tragic death of Ohio Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones has resulted in laudatory posts across the ideological spectrum.  Conservatives have added their voices to the liberal chorus complimenting her list of “first” achievements.

It is an interesting contrast to the deaths of former Senator Jesse Helms and former White House spokesman Tony Snow.  In those cases, conservative eulogies were all but drowned out by the often-vulgar hatred that poured forth from “progressives” in the blogosphere.  They made it quite clear that their ideological differences rendered their opponents subhuman and the deaths of those opponents cause for celebrations and vitriol.

As a matter of principle, I am committed to moderate and centrist politics.  I believe there are important truths to be found from both liberals and conservatives and even a few marxist-type radicals.  But when confronted with the underlying political culture of left and right, it is often difficult not to be disproportionately repelled by the left.  Sure, there are haters on the right too — racist groups like Stormfront spring to mind — but they lack the overwhelming numerical dominance that haters appear to enjoy on the left.

Troubling.  Wasn’t the new left the movement that was born in rhetoric of “love” in the 1960s and which claims the mantles of “tolerance” and “diversity” now?

UPDATE: When the Arkansas Democratic Party Chair was shot, the leftist blogosphere erupted with sweeping condemnations of the entire conservative movement, especially talk radio, for having caused the violence before any information was available at all as to motive.  But when John McCain’s Denver office receives terrorist attacks that are clearly politically motivated, the left is held pure and innocent.

Under open threat of violence and mayhem from a range of groups for whom the Democratic Party is not sufficiently “progressive”, the city of Denver has prepared a holding facility for protesters that bears an eerie resemblance to the temporary facilities constructed at Guantanamo Bay after 9/11.  Not content with the over-the-top moniker “Gitmo on the Platte”, however, protesters are driven to new heights of hyperbole in their outrage:

“That’s how you treat cattle,” said Adam Jung of the group Tent State University. “You showed the sign where it said stun gun in use and you just change the word gun for bolt and it’s a meat processing plant.”

No word yet from Denver officials on when the slaughtering machines will arrive or whether the gutting and butchering crews will be cleared by immigration officials before they set to work on protesters’ carcasses.

The facilities are stark, to be sure, but such choices are all but forced on convention cities as they are increasingly faced by protest groups for whom violence is an expression of true commitment and arrest is a rite of passage into protester Valhalla.  Such groups as “Recreate ‘68″ seek openly to cause destruction and injury in hopes of recapturing glory days of Chicago riots in 1968.  And that is just what they have prepared for Democrats.  Officials preparing for the Republican Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, might have to commandeer the cages at the Minnesota Zoo…

The narcissism of the extreme left is on full display today over at the Huffington Post, where Robert Scheer concocts a conspiracy theory worthy of a Paulbot.  Scheer claims that the Georgian Crisis is the creation of a “diabolical” “neoconservative cabal” (yes, his exact words — these guys’ BDS defies parody) trying to manipulate the 2008 American presidential election:

McCain gets to look tough with a new Cold War to fight while Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, scrambling to make sense of a more measured foreign policy posture, will seem weak in comparison. Meanwhile, the dire consequences of the Bush legacy that McCain has inherited, from the disaster of Iraq to the economic meltdown, conveniently will be ignored. But the military-industrial complex, which has helped bankroll the neoconservatives, will be provided with an excuse for ramping up a military budget that is already bigger than that of the rest of the world combined.

Oh, dear.  When will Scheer get into the nefarious role that the Bilderbergs are playing and their links to the Illuminati too?  More importantly, how did the neocons get the Russians to deploy soldiers, tanks, and bombers to help elect John McCain?  And does that count as a campaign contribution?

Yes, the far left really does seem to think that everything that happens in the entire world — even a war 10,000 miles away — is really only about us Americans and our domestic political vendettas.  Welcome to Bizzaro World with your host, Robert Scheer.

Lately some on the left have been working hard at revising downward Ronald Reagan’s legacy of ending the Cold War and creating the opportunity, since lost, for the first period of extended peace since WW II.  The Soviet Union, Kathy says, was never a threat at all.  In fact, the U.S. was the antagonist all the while. 

Ronald Reagan did not “win” the Cold War. If any one person can be credited with bringing the Cold War to an end, that person was Mikhail Gorbachev.

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Those who argue that the anti-war movement is not infected with a substantial and highly influential group of activists who outright hate military members as individuals have another tough spin job today, as Kenneth Thiesen publishes a piece in the Berkeley Daily Planet that is remarkably forthright about admitting to and even promoting the most vicious kinds of accusations against military members. (more…)

I thought I had Barack Obama figured out. I thought he was no more liberal than Hillary Clinton but far more likely to bridge the divides in this nation. But, if that’s what I am seeing, why are America’s leftists seeing something entirely different? A day after Obama gets the MoveOn.org arch-liberal seal of approval, there’s this Christopher Hayes piece in The Nation, encouraging the left to rally behind Obama. (more…)