Whytwolf's diary on DailyKost, Piss a Liberal Off: Right-Wing Bullies, hit fairly close to home.

I don't think "Pissing off a liberal" is really about my views, or even the clinic cowboy's views. I think it goes deeper than that. Those who have grown up believing that aggression and/or violence is the best way to solve a problem have ultimately found themselves cut off from the empathetic side of their social dealings. This breeds contempt for those who have more empathy, and can interact in a calm manner with others--those of us who have embraced the ideologies of the left.

Why do Republicans still whimper about how victimized they are when they control the entire mechanism of government? Why will Alberta Conservatives and Reformers complain about the rest of Canada shutting them out even now that the 'West is in'? Perhaps it has to do with the fact that they are victims--of their own emotional makeup. While progressives can build grassroots organizations based on community, these days only hatred and contempt seems to motivate the hard-right grassroots. They envy our community and comradeship, knowing it is something they can never take part in.

Even with all their power, they cannot make people like them--instead the vast majority of people who are moderate and centrist loath them even more now.

I was the victim of a great deal of verbal abuse as a child but generally avoided most physical abuse. As I grew up, I began to look down on bullies as petty insignifican people who would be lucky if they ever got a job that didn't involve scrubbing urinals or pulling weeds. I certainly could see them accomplishing anything great in life.

Only by marginalizing them in that way within my mind was I able to ignore them, but even then I wasn't always that successfull. I found myself wishing for them to suffer the fate they forced on so many others. I grew to truly loathe the worst of them and certainly pitied the rest, and I'm sure that colored my interaction with them and others, but I never acted on it.

One particularly interesting situation I found ymself in was after exchanging words with someone in health class they followed me down the hallway and started punching me in the back. He wasn't hitting hard enough that I felt a need to turn around a strike back so I just continued walking to a spot where I knew there would be a number of teachers around. He quit on his own. The amazing thing, though, was I met him a month later in a special group on of the school's social workers had set up for victims of bullying. He and I ended up becoming friends after that.

He was certainly the exception to the rule, in that he was smarter than most of the others and was more reacting to his own stress than acting out of any innate tendancy towards bullying. We were in much the same position, but simply reacted differently.

What has angered me most about the rise of the right is that the showcase many of the attitudes of the worst of those bullies, as you have noted in this diary. People who treat others that way and act towards the world with such contempt should have NO voice WHATSOEVER in public debate. They are useless to the world in harm everyone with whom they come into contact. And worse, they have wasted all their energies on those persuits instead of actually trying to educate and better themselves so that now they are not only bullies, but incompetant bullies.

I can see no more dangerous situation than a country being controlled by these types of people. I can think of a number of times when equally antisocial individuals managed to gain power in the world and they are the likes of Ivan the Terrible, Stalin, Hitler, Hussein. These people all show the classic traits and they impact they had on the world around them could only be described as catastrophic in the extreme. If they democratic process cannot right this sinking ship in the United States quickly enough, we may soon be adding ourselves to that most notorious list.

Our very future depends on us not allowing that to happen.