Ethel the Blog on where the hatred is coming from:
I’ve been saying this (intermittently) since 1992, when I was quite frankly shocked at the sustained vehement and vicious reactions of the locals here at 90% GOP University to Clinton having won a presidential election the old-fashioned way. It was as if the divine right of the royal, ruling class to the oval office – which had been held by the GOP for 16 of the 20 years between 1972 and 1992 – had been usurped by satan himself. I distinctly remember one mouth-breather ranting over and over, “I’d kill that motherfucker with my bare hands if I had the chance!” immediately after the election. And the palpable and vocal hatred barely diminished at all over the next 8 years. My shock wore off when I realized where most if not all of the gasoline for the fire came from. These people were damned near all dittoheads. They ate lunch at places where rant/hate radio was played, and they listened to more rant/hate radio in their offices all afternoon. I wasn’t exposed to this in my department (oceanography being populated by a pack of godless, hellbound commies who don’t feel the need to impose hours of talk radio on their officemates), but found out about it from sane friends in the engineering school, wherein most of the denizens owned well-stained copies of Heinlein and Pournelle, were convinced that being able to solve a static beam problem made them uber- gods, and – most of all – knew everything Rush told them was not just the absolute truth but God’s absolute truth. (And it wasn’t just the engineering school: a friend in the econ department had some family and financial problems that were intruding on academics, and when he went in to discuss them with the department’s counselor, the counselor actually had the radio playing Limbaugh’s show loudly for the entire appointment.)