I spoke last night on Obama and the transformational possibilities that would open up with his victory, to an overwhelmingly friendly congregation at Temple Emanuel in Great Neck, on Long Island. During the Q-and-A, a man halfway back in the audience started shouting: "You have no business here! Shut up! Get out! Obama hates Israel! You hate Israel! You're anti-American! You're a Communist!" And so on. (I think there was something about terrorists, too, though I'm not sure, the acoustics not having been designed for enraged disruptions.) The shouter had to be, as they say, escorted out. Rabbi Robert Widom closed out the evening with an impassioned appeal for civility. Without question he spoke for his deeply embarrassed audience.

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I wrote three weeks ago about Sean Hannity featuring the longtime anti-Semitic propagandist Andy Martin in his hour-long screed against Obama on Fox News. Now here's Howard Kurtz in Monday's WP:

Martin said on the show that Obama's community-organizing work in Chicago was "training for a radical overthrow of the government." The onetime political candidate has a history of making controversial statements. In a 1983 personal bankruptcy case, according to the Chicago Tribune, he referred to a judge as a "crooked, slimy Jew" and described Holocaust survivors in a filing as "operating as a wolf pack." Martin has denied holding anti-Semitic views....

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Slate's Jack Shafer, inveterate practitioner of the countercyclical twist-and-reverse, warns that "tiny tendrils of trepidation are starting to drift over the liberal members of the commentariat and the political press corps." Not because they fear Obama will lose, but because they're so enraptured by him, "so convinced that his candidacy is momentous, without parallel, and earth-shattering," so "in love with the idea of Obama, of the 'meaning' of his run for the presidency," that they're courting "performance anxiety." "How," he wonders, "do you pack all the Obama touch points--healing, hope, change, civility, the second coming of Camelot, post-boomer politician, inspirer of youth, great uniter, world president, and so on--into one story without sounding hagiographic?"

Speaking for myself, I make no apologies for hearty enthusiasm, even spells of giddiness, whiffs of overconfidence calling for iron realism which then gives way to musings about this moment's transformational possibilities, the obstacles to same, and the Meaning Of It All. What with America's long-running abdication of moral nerve, a ruinous war, piles of spectacular malfeasance in high places and manifold abominations of the last eight years, any writer alive to the moment may be forgiven a touch--or more than a touch--of the rhetoric of wild aspiration. Hell, even an analytically tinctured gloat or two about the ruptures of the conservative movement is acceptable in my book.

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Here's a nifty new resource from Ph. D. student John Kelly, who when he's not getting his degree in Communications at Columbia is teaching at Harvard's Berkman Center. Go to his Morningside Analytics site and you can see how many liberal and conservative blogs link to the 100 top political YouTube videos over recent days. You can thus, in his words, "Measure the Movement of Ideas through Social Networks."