E-mail I just sent to Nicholas Kristof:

Dear Mr. Kristof:

I know that you’ve expressed concern in some of your columns about liberal anger at President Bush. You’ve said that you find this anger disturbing in the way you find conservative anger at President Clinton disturbing.

Yet you don’t seem to write very much about that conservative anger.

Yesterday Senator Hillary Clinton made some television appearances; conservatives who discuss politics at Lucianne Goldberg’s Lucianne.com Web site were not amused. Here are some of the names they’ve used today at Lucianne.com to describe Senator Clinton:

* The gelid-eyed witch.

* This lying harpy.

* This jezebel.

* Her Thighness.

* Pure evil.

* Her royal pigness, snorting away.

* Hanoi Hillary.

* Miss Piggy.

* Haggy McNasty with a voice like an ice-cube enema.

* The shrew.

* Hildabroom.

* This hag [who] would steal the stink off of Shiite.

* The pink Marxist.

* Her Wickenedness.

* This scumbag.

* The stench of the decaying flesh, raw sewage and anaerobic infection.

(Source: http://www.lucianne.com/threads2.asp?artnum=96486)

Hillary Clinton isn’t the president. Hillary Clinton isn’t running for president. Hillary Clinton is a first-term senator in the minority party, and is therefore rather powerless. Furthermore, she has frequently tacked to the center -- as she did in her television appearances yesterday, in which she defended President Bush’s interpretation of Iraq intelligence. Given all that, isn’t her detractors’ anger more disturbing than anger directed at a president who has a great deal of power and, after running as a right-centrist, has chosen to wield it in aggressive and highly partisan ways? Doesn’t the persistence of this extreme vitriol deserve more than a passing mention in one of your columns?

Sincerely,