The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle has a post titled, “Who’s Crazy Now?”, in which she writes, “Liberal rage at right-wing loonies is starting to sound, well, a little loonie.” She cites comments by the Washington Post’s E. J. Dionne and the New York Times’s Frank Rich and asks, “Why are so many journalists losing basic touch with reality?”

It’s a good question. After all, liberals have the man they viewed as a secular savior, a “sort of God,” in the White House. Democrats control 60 seats in the Senate and a 257–178 advantage in the House. This was supposed to be their time. Yet if you go to the Left’s most important internet outlets and its cable news station of choice, MSNBC, you find anger, rage, and fury. This has become, I think, very nearly a permanent state for many of them. Keith Olbermann, the ESPN-sportscaster-turned-rabid-commentator, embodies this as well as anyone. His show is all about channeling hate. For years it was hate directed against Bush; today it is hate directed at others. It appears to have consumed him and turned him, and the guests who appear on his program, into comic figures. Olbermann’s show is interesting, then, not as a political program but as a sociological and psychological phenomenon. Perpetual anger and dissatisfaction is interesting to watch — for a while. Then it gets boring. And then it gets clinical.