I have been following politics for a long while and, believe it or not, by temperament I'm fairly low key. (Some might say I'm dead inside.) I was a fervent 70's reformer and a strong anti-Reaganite, but even then I can't say that I was particularly rabid in my beliefs. It was never my personal style to be a bombthrower.

I suspect that many others who are engaged in the netroots like me became radicalized in their 30's and 40's by a Republican Party that started to behave as an openly undemocratic institution. Why so many of these establishment Democrats and insider press corps aren't exercised by this after what we've seen, I can't imagine. Perhaps they just can't see the forest for the trees. This past decade has not been business as usual.

History has many examples of societies that enabled radical political factions to dominate, through inertia, cynicism or plain intimidation. It happened in Europe in the 25 years before I was born and almost destroyed the whole planet. I know it's unfashionably hysterical to be concerned about such things, but I have never believed that America was so "exceptional" that it couldn't happen here.

The stakes are incredibly high. Without the cold war polarity, the US has bigger responsibilities than ever. And instead of behaving like a mature democracy and world leader, we have been alternating from adolescent tabloid obsessives to playground bullies. This is serious business.

The center-left blogosphere may sound overwrought, but in fact it is a rational, clear-headed response to what has been happening --- and continues to happen as this country's political establishemt fiddles and fulminates about civility.

This is as good a time as any to say something I've been meaning to say for a while: for me, personally, one of the worst consequences of the right-wing take-over of the Republican party, and the Republican take-over of the Federal government is the amount of vitriol and near-hatred the terrible things they have done to this country have provoked in me.

I didn't used to despise so many people before as I do now, and I really dislike it that I do. Not that I don't believe that my feelings aren't justified -- I think they're very justified -- but such levels of vitriolic unhappiness are basically unnatural to me.

Back in Nixon's day, I really thought he was awful, but I didn't feel about him as intensely as I do about Bush and Cheney and DeLay and Lott and Coulter and Harris and too, too many others. I thought Nixon was a bad man, an unprincipled and dangerous man, but I didn't necessarily think that everyone around him was bad (although many surely were) and my level of dislike didn't work its way up to the really visceral disgust that I have for Bush and company, the kind of revulsion that twists your gut and keeps you up at night and causes you to ask your doctor for something to ease the tension.

It's terrible feeling this way, and, frankly, I don't think it's my fault. I didn't want to hate them like this, they made me hate them by doing all the terrible things that they do, and by continuing to do those kinds of things, and by the continuing revelations of even more things they're doing and intend to keep doing.

And to add to it, I'm fully aware that statements very similar to these were made by the anti-Clintonistas to justify their unwarranted hatred of Bill Clinton -- the difference being, of course, that their "facts" have turned out to be mostly fantasies (some of them quite sick), and our facts are based in the bitter reality we wake up and face every morning: meaningless deaths in an unprovoked and unnecessary war, the continuing erosion of civil liberties in favor of centralized authoritarianism, an economy that keeps on "getting better" all the time without helping everyday people thrive, or even just get through their lives, and so on and so on and so forth, the familiar litany of death, destruction, retrenchment and rollback caused by Bush and Cheney and their policies and programs.

There seems to be no end to it -- we've still got years of the Bush administration to go, and no end to their misdeeds in sight. The chances of taking back Congress are certainly better than they once were, but I'm not buying into the hope quite yet, since I couldn't stand to have it dashed again by the brutal reality of yet another thuggish Republican victory.

So, please, excuse me when I rant, and pardon me when my intense repugnance for the brigands who have hijacked our country gets the better of me. I know that I shouldn't feel these feelings, but I can't help myself -- I've been pushed into a corner and kicked in the gut one too many times.