"I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city."

"And don't wonder why He hasn't helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I'm not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that's the case, don't ask for His help because he might not be there."

--Pat Robertson, on a November (9 or 10) broadcast of The 700 Club, in response to the vote in which eight Dover, Pennsylvania, school board members up for re-election lost their seats after trying to introduce a statement on "intelligent design" to high school biology students.

"Listen, citizens of San Francisco, if you vote against military recruiting, you're not going to get another nickel in federal funds. Fine. You want to be your own country? Go right ahead.

And if Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead.

-- Bill O'Reilly, on a November 8th broadcast of The O'Reilly Factor, critical of a San Francisco ballot measure which strongly encourages public high schools and colleges to prohibit on-campus military recruiting.

I was struck by the similarity in wording, and on almost the same day. And I wonder...are their followers ever going to notice that they have come completely unhinged? Or is complete crazification the appeal? Also, I wonder why being a right winger seems to confer an apparently irresistible urge to threaten bodily harm to one's political opponents. Like Zell Miller challenging Chris Matthews to a duel or Ann Coulter's belief that the state needs to "physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too." Of course, I'm inclined to think it's because a will to violence is an inherent component of the current right wing. That is, I believe they do not start out simply as ideological "conservatives" and then become so convinced of their own correctness that they eventually lose all sense of perspective and start frothing at the mouth demanding their opponents be physically punished. I believe they start out wanting to hurt things (people, animals, the natural environment -- anything alive). Then they try to find an ideological system that justifies the expression of this urge. Sure, right now it's just expressed with poisonous rhetoric. But I wonder...I suspect that Coulter would shoot me if she thought she could get away with it. But that's only because she knows I could beat her at mud wrestling.