enhancing your self-esteem by dehumanizing your opponents

it's hard to deal with rigid rightists who don't like debt and taxes. on the other hand, it's pretty hard to deal with people, such as tim egan and paul krugman who simply screech that their opponents are evil and insane. indeed egan launches the missile: eric cantor is an anarchist. fortunately no one actually does have to deal with egan and krugman in the context of a budget negotiation, and everyone in their echo chamber can just nod along. the left feels good about themselves in proportion as they can portray their opponents as inhuman, irrational monsters. they measure their own intelligence by the insults they can throw at their opponents (consider the non-stop 'stupid!' aimed at reagan, bush, palin); this is an excellent self-esteem enhancer, but unfortunately, the extreme grim repetitiveness and excruciating unoriginality with which these insults are formulated are a better index of the intellectual capacity of those who repeat them than are their own self-congratulations. i guess that's their strategy for overcoming the partisan divide. you might want to keep in mind that krugman's basic position is that a $14 trillion dollar debt is unacceptably low.