Eschaton

Digby, channeling my pal Snotglass, on Ann Coulter(from my comments):

Liberals still don't get it.

The good Americans of the rural red states are so highly sophisticated that they are very familiar with the subtle irony and satire Coulter employs. They know her mildly inflammatory rhetoric is pretty much a (screamingly funny) joke and they see it as no more than poking harmless fun at a bunch of liberal New Yorkers.

This is so very different from what MWO does when they irresponsibly call members of the press "whores." They are inciting the many violent politically active liberals of the urban blue states who take such terms literally and believe that the members of the media are actually turning tricks in the seedy areas of Washington DC. They are incapable of understanding that "whore" used in this context is a metaphor (something which is much too complex a concept for the parochial big city libs.) They might feel compelled to act out some vigilante justice and hurt some of these journalists because they think MWO wants them to. They're that suggestable.

I've found that when speaking to liberals you need to speak very slowly and very literally. Many of them weren't Christian homeschooled and spent an unfortunate amount of time in public universities. Unlike the worldly creationist intellectuals who enjoy Coulter, liberals just aren't well educated enough to be able to distinguish rollicking good humor from an incitement to violence.

This debate just points out, once again, that radical liberals just don't understand the difference between cosmopolitan red staters and the provincial inhabitants of blue state America. Until they do, they will never have a governing majority or a political mandate like the one George W. Bush currently enjoys.