Gene Lyons Messes with Texas, Gene Lyons Hears from Texans

Samples from Gene Lyons' email inbox, after he dared to mess with Texas by telling the truth about Rick Perry:

I like feeling superior and more wise than you.  You are a scared little man with no heart ... Just a little wimpy leftist.

And the equally cutting,

You, like most people from Arkansas, are both jealous and afraid of anybody from Texas.

Gene Lyons concludes,

Virility and humiliation are omnipresent themes, a veritable catalog of adolescent revenge fantasies. It's remarkable how many remain obsessed with Bill Clinton's sins -- real and imagined.

Heaven knows there are loons and crackpots on the left, but nothing like the kind of focused outrage that's building on the populist right. It seems to me that it's going to be a very long time until November 2012.

And, dear God, he's right.