Anger Management. The Language of Winners. Even the Venerable.

All you Tea-baggers out there, consider yourselves on notice:

You have always assumed, perhaps rightly at times, that Liberals won't fight back when you threaten us with violence; that we hate fighting and conflict at any cost and, abject cowards, show up at a gunfight with a knife and a white flag - if we show up at all.

I advise you not to lay too much reliance upon this passel of nonsense today. One gift President Obama has given the Left is permission to feel powerful, like winners. To let the seductive serum of testosterone, endorphins, and victory flow through our veins. So don't expect the same old Liberal welcome when you come to piss down my back and tell me it's raining, when you come bearing bricks and accusations of treason.

Can you imagine: Ignorant, violent thugs breaking windows, cutting gas lines, threatening murder, destroying private property - flouting the most basic laws of civilized society for the protection of life and property - and then lecturing US us on what constitutes patriotism?

How stupid do you think I am?!

I've said it before and I'll say it again: you cannot be a patriotic U.S. citizen while violating its most basic laws against violence and protection of private property.

I say you're the fascists, you racist, homophobic, law-breaking criminal scrotum-suckers!

... so remember all this, especially before you come to throw bricks through the
windows of GTL Headquarters.

* * * * *

And to you, my erstwhile fellow Liberals, I would like to say the following:

Wake up!

We WON!!

It is now time to change the vocabulary, to steer the juggernaut of popular opinion with new, powerful phrases, with ringing new language as befits your proud accomplishment. Time for a victory lap around the Semiotic track, and a new set of signs pointing our American millions away from the brink of psychotic collapse, toward greater equality and perhaps even justice.

Even you, Frank Rich, venerable sage of the New York Times, are falling into the language of defeat:

It's not a health care BILL. Stop calling it a health care BILL.

IT IS A HEALTH CARE LAW.

I know this is not relevant to the content of your story in today's paper, Mr. Rich, and I count myself as a grateful fan of your sanity and your newspaper columns. But it is important nonetheless. Critically important. The words you use matter. A lot.

And, as the Right has taught us over the years, who owns the language owns the narrative.

America loves a winner. The health care law will be fabulously popular with voters, and soon.

It is high time for us to be the winners, to feel it, and to name what we won fair and square.

The Party of Bad Behavior

Think, friends.

Think back to the era when Republicans were in their ascendancy. When radical "conservatives" seized control of Congress, then the White House, then the Supreme Court and the media.

How many Republican offices were vandalized then?

How many screaming Democrats hurled racial or homophobic slurs at elected officials - or accused a president of being a liar, DURING a state of the union address??

How many liberals threatened to use violence to "water the tree of liberty?"

In short, how many liberals felt the need to act out in shameful, degrading and even illegal ways to express their displeasure at having lost a fair fight in a political contest? How many liberals find it easy to disregard the rule of law when they feel justified?

None. Not one.

If we turn off the sound and look only at the behavior, which group is the dangerous one? Which is the saner?

To you mean-spirited, right-wing jihadists - and you know who you are - I say this:

You shame yourself and your party. Given your druthers, you'd shame our whole country, and all Americans.

You may not break the rules because you are losing the game.