Have you noticed how sensitive some of these Republicans are? When did plain and simple opposition become political hate speech?

After former Vice-President Al Gore delivered a smart, sometimes humorous, and ultimately scathing critique of the Bush Administration‘s assault on the environment in a speech in New York City last Thursday, GOP Chairman Ed Gillespie characterized Gore’s remarks as “political hate speech” and called on him to repudiate such “vile tactics.” (Click here for the full text of Gore’s speech.)

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay–who dishes it out but can’ t take it–had the same overheated reaction to Senator Edward Kennedy‘s powerful talk last week in which he accused Bush and his advisers of capitalizing on fear from the September 11th attacks and putting “a spin on truth to justify a war that could well become one of the worst blunders in more than two centuries of American foreign policy.” (Click hereto read Kennedy’s remarks.)

Kennedy’s speech, according to DeLay–the man aptly called the Hammer–was a “hateful attack” that “insulted the President’s patriotism.” Someone’s gotta get these guys into a good Con-Law class fast before they brand the Bill of Rights a subversive document because it protects the right to dissent–or what Gillespie calls “political hate speech.”

NOTE: Thanks to longtime Nation reader Adam Komisaruk from Morgantown, West Virginia for his help with drafting “Parallel O’Reilly Factor.”

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Grover’s World

Talking about political hate, did you see the Washington Post‘s January 12 profile of anti-tax guru Grover Norquist? Norquist, an intimate of Karl Rove is the head of Americans for Tax Reform and the architect of a rightwing infrastructure designed to implement his long-cherished plan to shrink government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

More recently, Norquist has made comments like “Bipartisanship is another name for date rape,” or fantastically compared the estate tax to the Holocaust. (His reasoning: Referring to the supposedly specious argument that the estate tax was worth keeping because it really affected only “two percent of Americans,” Norquist went on, “I mean that’s the morality of the Holocaust. ‘Well, it’s only a small percentage,’ you know, I mean, it’s not you. It’s somebody else.”)

Now, he’s ready to crush and purge. According to the Post profile, Norquist says “Democrats used to anger him.” But “he’s past angry now. ‘Do you get mad at cancer? We’ll defeat and crush their institutions, and the trial lawyers will go sell pizza, We’re not going to hang them. Most of the the people on the left will be happy in Grover’s world. I feel about the left the way Rumsfeld felt about the Iraqis.” Welcome to Grover’s world. Talk about haters.

NOTE: Thanks to longtime Nation reader Adam Komisaruk from Morgantown, West Virginia for his help with drafting “Parallel O’Reilly Factor.”