“Unhinged”

I picked up my friend Michelle Malkin’s book, “Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild” to peruse it, thinking I would get around to reading it when I finished the other three books I’m currently reading on and off. After reading the first few pages, though, I was hooked and had to read the whole thing.

Michelle deliberately chose the title, “Unhinged,” purposely, to convey that the American Left, generally speaking, has long since come unglued, giving itself over to irrationality and extremism rather than reasoned discourse. “This book,” writes Michelle, “is not about liberals being liberal. It is about liberals who’ve lost their grip on sanity and reality.”

Today, you can cite myriad examples of liberal irrationality, conspiracy theory, flagrant dishonesty and even violence, and say, “Well, every political movement has its extremists, but they aren’t representative of the whole and therefore do not taint the movement itself.”

But Michelle amasses a book’s worth of evidence demonstrating that these bizarre thought and behavior patterns are far too voluminous to be dismissed as anecdotal. They are indicative of a mindset — an unhealthy one at that, which she documents meticulously in her first chapter, “Liberals on the Couch.”

There she cites example after painful example of liberals themselves admitting their unmitigated personal hatred for President Bush and how it colors their view of every issue and in many cases affects their psychological well being.

Even with the mountains of evidence and the liberals’ self-confessed anti-Bush obsession, it would still be difficult to paint the entirety of the American Left as a few bricks shy of a load. But, as Michelle points out, we’re not just talking about a couple hundred mouth-foaming radicals on the Internet. “The scariest part is, these Internet crazies aren’t just riding along in the Democrat bus — they’re driving it.”

Indeed. Mad Howard Dean was not only the failed Democrat presidential contender whose scary, defamatory and ludicrous rants ignited the equally scary base of the Democratic Party. Party leaders not only rarely distanced themselves from Dean’s outbursts, they elevated him to lead their party.

It wasn’t merely some Internet loons who compared America’s treatment of enemy detainees at Gitmo to that of the Nazi and Communist prison camps. It was prominent Democrat Senator Richard Durbin.

Nor was it just certain rabid Democratic Underground posters who said President Bush’s Iraq War was concocted in Texas for political reasons, Bush knew in advance about 9-11 and allowed it to happen and Karl Rove was behind Dan Rather’s forged documents scandal. It was Sen. Ted Kennedy, Democratic Congressman Cynthia McKinney, and former Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe, respectively.

And, it’s not just Democrat politicians who consider Karl Rove the personification of evil. No less a liberal icon than Walter Cronkite hinted to Larry King that Karl Rove might have been behind Osama bin Laden’s public threat in October 2004 — just before the presidential election — of further terrorist attacks.

After all, this idea was not that far-fetched when you believed, as many on the Left apparently did, that Bush and Rove staged Saddam’s capture for maximum political effect and similarly had Osama stashed away and prepared to announce it when it best suited their obscene political interests. This “unhinged” theory about Osama, by the way, was voiced by President Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright.

I challenge you to read this book cover to cover and emerge still believing — assuming you did before — that the modern Democratic Party is the party of tolerance and compassion. Especially read the chapter “When Angry Democrats Attack,” and tell us with a straight face, “Each party has an equal number of crazies with violent propensities.”

You simply can’t dismiss this rampant violence with meaningless platitudes designed to establish a false moral equivalence. There is no moral equivalence. Nor is there any way to casually write off the all-too-frequent calls for President Bush’s assassination from leftist loons, or the mainstream media’s utter lack of outrage by them.

On one level “Unhinged” is amusing, because it cites case after case of literally unbelievable episodes. But on a far more important level it is quite disturbing because these are not vignettes from Mad magazine, but real life reports of a movement that has delivered to the inmates the keys to the asylum.

Doubtlessly, this book will be viciously panned by those it exposes. They are certainly entitled to their point of view, but I would encourage you to be skeptical of rebuttals cloaked in generalities. Those generalities will fall under the overwhelming weight of specific data Michelle marshals in this valuable book.