As a resident of Washington, D.C. who does not hold with the town’s dominant political ideology, I am constantly assailed by rudeness.
I can’t stroll on Connecticut Avenue without seeing T-shirts for sale that not only attack my beliefs but do so in a crude and vulgar way.
Columnist Larry Elder has also experienced a number of encounters with this kind of rudeness:
“Take last Friday. After work, I drove to a local watering hole for my customary vodka and cran. A couple of anti-war Democrats and I began talking politics. While I disagreed with their positions, they made sensible, if unpersuasive, arguments. You know the drill: Bush built a case for war on bad intelligence; the cultural complexity of Iraq makes America’s ‘imposition’ of a democracy unlikely; the Iraq War now serves as a breeding ground for terrorists; other enemies like Iran and North Korea pose even greater threats to America; etc. But then another man, eavesdropping, decided to join in. Within five seconds, he called the president ‘an idiot.’ I let it go. Moments later, however, he changed it to ‘moron.'”
They may be rude, but as Jim Bowman points out, that’s not all–they are hopelessly naive:
“The unspoken assumption behind their protests was that, merely by existing the protestors had acquired a right not only to speak up on the issues of the day but also to be listened to — even though they have only slogans and no serious geopolitical or strategic arguments to offer. At the protests, the level of debate was typified by one of the Telegraph’s other interviewees who said: ‘Bush is so uncool.'”