Bloods vs. Crips: politics as gang war

This is what the tea party would have been like without fox and the Koch brothers.

Oh dear, I’ve upset the wingnuts.

People who’ve had the misfortune to witness an episode of the old McLaughlin Group will understand what those who truly care about politics are like.

Comment thread as a battle of soccer hooligans.

Francois Furet wrote in his great book, The Passing of an Illusion, that the communist movement of the 20th Century was driven by nothing so much as pure, venomous hatred of the bourgeoisie.

Others have observed that all political movements are motivated by that sentiment, the object only being different from one faction to the next.

And yet, normally, comment threads at partisan sites are composed exclusively of enthusiastic endorsements of whatever was said in the parent post, however fatuous, vicious, or absurd and, ordinarily, utterly hateful.