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There's No Upside to This Anger

Anger? You want anger?

Every story I read about the politics of our Terrible Economic Times, a columnist always mentions "American's anger." Sure, you can be angry about persistent high unemployment. You can be angry at the never-ending stupidity in Congress. You can be angry at President Obama as either a supporter or an enemy.

But the anger I'm talking about is not the emotion that subsides. It's the phony anger of politicians who incite very stupid people into the badlands of outright hate: hate against other people that goes far beyond anger.

What's always struck me the most about the Tea Party is how selective they are in their alleged "anger." These are people who, egged on by the likes of Michele Bachmann, think they're on the verge of becoming slaves. These are not "angry" people, they are actually bad people looking for an excuse to unleash their hatred. These are people who drive their cars to Tea Party rallies and scream and shout and wave their nonsensical signs about "tyranny" and then drive home, grabbing something to eat from McDonald's along the way. (And then blog about it all.) These are people duped into thinking all their taxes have ben raised, oblivious to the fact that they got more money back in their paychecks. But oh no, they're "angry" about how much they're suffering.

Michele Bachmann in particular likes to use that word "tyranny." And it's a perfect example of "I do not think that word means what you think it means." You get already bad people together who are "angry" and insist their freedoms are being taken away, but you offer no actual example. You keep using the word "tyranny" and for people like me, all I can think of is John Wilkes Booth: "Such to tyrants!" as he shot Lincoln. This country doesn't know tyranny. This country doesn't know "emergency laws" that last decades and prevent protest and random imprisonment. Yet you would think that's exactly what's going to happen: I still have yet to hear anyone come out and say that Barack Obama's re-education camps never existed. Not a peep. "Oh, that's just political rhetoric," go the apologists. Tell that the scores of idiots who actually believe it because *you* told them that.

What we have is, to use the language of Revelation, the Devil let loose for a while. There is no anger, there is ugly hatred. People like radio talk-show host Mark Levin, who spent the better part of the summer of 2008 reading from "Rules for Radicals" has been proven wrong, wrong, wrong about everything he said would happen. But here's the catch: stupid people never remember anything. So I have no doubt that Mr. Levin has ever been called to task for his failed prophecies. Or, put another way, I'm sure like every other liar quoting from a book, he's retooled what he said, to the bobbing heads of people who wouldn't know a fact if it came up and bit them on the ass.

We don't have anger in this country. We have hatred that's being stoked in coded language, in outright lies and accepted by an increasingly hostile public. There's no upside to any of this.