There's been a lot of blogging and reporting about the rise of right-wing anger over the Obama presidency.  Is this something new and dangerous, or just politics as usual? How comparable is the anti-Obama energy on the right to the anti-Bush energy that animated the left for most of 8 years?  Is Rush Limbaugh the equivalent of Michael Moore?  Is the depiction of Obama as the Joker equivalent to depictions of George Bush as Alfred E. Newman?  This is worth examining.  

When it come to harsh, sometimes unfair criticism and contemptuous mockery, I think we on the left give as good as we get from the right.  (We may not quite match the rhetorical ugliness of the Hannitys and Coulters, but our mockery is much funnier than theirs.)  Politics is a rough game and we play rough just like the other guys do; we can express dismay at the nastiness coming from the other side but to be fair I think we do it too.  

But there are two other elements where I think the anti-Obama rage is way out of balance with anything from the left in recent history:  unhinged paranoia and the threat of violence.  

Perhaps the 9/11 conspiracy theorists are the moral equivalent of birthers, but crackpot theories about the 9/11 attacks never gained any traction in the Democratic mainstream.  By contrast, a majority of Republicans seem to be either firm birthers, or "I'm not sure" fellow travelers.  In all of 8 years of anti-Bush agitation, I can't think of any mainstream example of leftie reality-denial that's comparable to birtherism.  Can anyone?  I know that Michael Moore injected a little paranoia into Fahrenheit 9/11, but implying that the tobacco industry lobby might've been behind allowing lighters on planes seems like pretty tame stuff compared to the birther conspiracy and its ilk (Obama as Muslim, Obama as terrorist sympathizer, Obama as racist, Obama as anti-Semite, Obama as antichrist ... well, the last one doesn't have a lot of traction, at least not yet.)

I also see a strong threat of violence in the anti-Obama movement that just wasn't a factor in Bush bashing.  Cindy Sheehan might've been a huge pain to Dubya on his vacation, but she never (to my recollection) urged her supporters to take any violent actions against him.  Michael Moore might be unfair, shrill and even a little bit paranoid, but I never heard him ask us to do anything but get out and vote.  The subtext of violent armed overthrow of our elected government seems to be exclusively a right-wing phenomenon.

So where does this leave us?  It's not about how we play the game of politics - both sides play rough.  It's about the deliberate stoking of paranoid delusions and the threat of violence.  I'll argue with anyone that the mainstream left just didn't do this even in the heat of Bush-bashing - and that the mainstream right is playing with fire.  A violent, paranoid and delusional mob is an unreliable ally.