So much for tolerance, civility and balance

It's been obvious to all of us for some time that people on the extremes of US politics, both left and right, are growing more and more intolerant of anyone who disagrees with their warped, twisted, monomaniacal perspectives.  Please note that I blame both sides equally.  You can't point a finger at a right-wing screed without finding one just as bad, if not worse, on the left, and vice versa.

That said, this diatribe by a far-left-wing commentator is so over-the-top as to be nauseating.

When I write that CNN politics writer Chris Cillizza is the rankest ***brain in the Western Hemisphere, I am not being nice to him. When I write that God clowned Chris Cillizza before he was born by making him Chris Cillizza instead of a ****-eating maggot, I am being unkind. When I say that Chris Cillizza himself is the punchline to the cruelest work of absurdist comedy in the history of the ****ing universe, and that the title of that work is On the Origin of Species, I am being mean. Likewise it probably is downright nasty for me to write that on the whole American society would benefit greatly by Chris Cillizza being fired out of a large cannon into an even larger cliff face. But I am not bullying Chris Cillizza. Categorically, I cannot do that.

“Wolf’s treatment of Sanders was bullying,” Cillizza wrote on CNN’s website yesterday, because he is an obsequious slimeball even more slovenly with language than his forebears were in the dispensation of their chromosomes. He’s referring to the standup set Michelle Wolf, a comedian, performed at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night, somewhat at the expense of White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a brazen, knowing, and hugely powerful enemy of the free press and deceiver of the public by trade. As you’ve surely read by now, Wolf joked that Sanders’s makeup—her “perfect smoky eye”—is made of the ashes of the facts she burns.

. . .

A frank and honest description of who she is and what she does would be much more harsh: Every day, Sarah Huckabee Sanders plants herself, by choice, between the public and the facts of what’s being done at the very highest levels of American executive power, and does her damnedest to break and delegitimize the means by which the two are brought together. She is one of the most visible and powerful people in American civic life, and she uses her visibility and power—she chooses to use her visibility and power—to confuse the public and degrade its grasp on the truth, rather than to inform or empower or serve it. Her willingness to do this on behalf of Donald Trump, day after day, and the unmistakable teeth-gnashing relish with which she does it, are the substance of her power, and the reason why anybody knows who the **** she is at all. What history will remember about Sanders is that she is the scum of the ****ing earth, and not the jokey means by which one comedian pointed out this inarguable fact—and that’s only if the senile rageaholic ****baby moron on whose behalf she shames herself on television every day doesn’t annihilate the human race, first.

There's more at the link . . . if you want to read it (which I don't recommend).

This obscene rant is precisely why I, and others like me, fear for the future of the American republic.  When the two extremes of political opinion are so far divided, so lost to facts and reality, so obsessed with their own (profoundly flawed) interpretation of current events, then the time can't be far away when some of them stop talking and start fighting.  Some would say that time has already arrived, given the antics of Antifa and their ilk (e.g. Berkeley) on one side, and the posturings of racial and far-right-wing extremists (e.g. Charlottesville) on the other.  There appears to be no middle ground whatsoever between such extremists:  no place where they might agree to differ, or exchange views in at least a semblance of civility.

Oh, well.  I suppose that means the rest of us, the civilized majority, will just have to deal with all such extremists, Left- or Right-wing, in the same way.  We'll have to regard all of them as a clear and present danger to our lives, safety and well-being, and respond accordingly.  I've done that before, in another country and another context.  So have many Americans in these troubled times.  We can always do so again closer to home, if that should become necessary.

Peter