I Googled for something completely different, but found your page…and have to say thanks. nice read….

Oh my God! Did you see that? Did you see what they do? What in the world is wrong with these people?

Tomj, you seem to have a bead on these people. Maybe established a report with some of them at one time. An understanding. Perhaps you would be able to explain to us, what the hell is wrong with them.

of course you are correct that I was engaging in hyperbole, and I will try to read your essays more carefully.

Your Journey is strange to me and perhaps not as complete a turnaround as I think.

I wish your thoughts were in a book, because it is easier to linger with a book than a screen.

In my young twenties I read War and Peace every year, and every time I was surprised by what happens to Prince Andrei and Natasha (I won’t say more than that in the unliekly event someone reads this and then goes and reads the novel). But online, I could read War and Peace in an afternoon.

here is what you said: “[A] large portion of the left have become hate-filled traitors.”

Rhetoric such as labeling people begins a process that is corrosive to the thinker. I read your full posts. I thanked you for speaking to me. As Americans, we have so much more that binds us together than divides us.

To Harry, My posts, an attempt to engage you directly with respect and humor, and the leftie blogs I love such as Eric Alterman and Bob Sommersby (daily howler), as well as the Joe G of the moderate voice and even Captain’s Quarter’s (which I read because I want to see things from the other side of the fence and disagree with but not because he is supposedly full of hate or “an evil right winger”, all have one thing in common with you, with Sally, and with Neo: we all have nothing to do with rioters at the G-8 Summit.

In Blogosphere-istan I would find examples of right wing violence and excess to supposedly “shoot down” this false example you are proposing, but why? Why not leave room for the possibility that characterizing as evil and hateful and violent the individuals of the left is as bad as characterizing the individuals of the right as greedy or war-loving or whatever the flavor of the day insult is?

My favorite thing in life is poetry; the poetry of loving my wife, my only wife whom I have loved exclusively for over 32 years, the poetry of my daughter and my family, the poetry of my friends, the poetry of a great well-made cup of coffee, the poetry of writing, and especially the poetry of Borges and Shakespeare and (my favorites) Rilke/Lorca/Lowell/Keats/Creeley/Kerouac & company. When argument and exchange of ideas take place I love blogs; when denunciations take place, they lose that poetry that I seek when I attend Mass each Sunday, the poetry God sent us here to signify, embody, celebrate.

Perhaps I cannot convince anyone that “[A] large portion of the left have become hate-filled traitors.” But I can tell you that it is wrong, morally wrong to assert such things, and invite you reconsider. And, I don’t even necessarily want you to change your mind about what we should do as a country and why we should do: I love this land and you may be right.

I am listening.

But here’s what I actually did say:
It’s not the policies you support or oppose that’s the problem, it’s the frenzied, fanatical, and often deranged expressions used to support them

– the examples of which tom simply ignores. Which, when you think about it, kind of epitomizes the attitude of the soft left toward any sort of “unpleasantness”, doesn’t it?

As for UB, I think he just has a difficult time with the concept of “thinking for yourself” in general.

The sheer number of earmarks in this Congress’ budget (over 36,000) shows that few in government truly want to end the “culture of corruption” that was Speaker Pelosi’s vaunted goal when she took office. (And what about that $180,000 job her son has with good old Vin Gupta’s InfoUSA, that bastion of rectitude?)

’08 is going to be a very depressing year.

I realize you’re probably just engaging in rhetorical hyperbole, but still, it’s nowhere near the case that I’ve had that global a shift. If you’ve read what I’ve written so far in my “A mind is a difficult thing to change” series, you’ll see, I think, that I certainly look with a more jaundiced eye at the MSM, and I question certain assumptions and assertions and facts, but by no means all. In fact, in many ways, I fit the defintion of someone who says I didn’t really leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me. My values, for example, remain very much the same as they always were (and my interests as well–such as “Romeo and Juliet.”)

http://zombietime.com/world_naked_bike_ride_2007/

…and while it’s not particularly “hateful,” it is rather representative of the intellectual leanings of the Left…