As a person of the right-wing persuasion, I have, like most right-wingers, been routinely accused by left-wingers of hatred on a near-daily basis for many many years. They tell me I hate the poor, I hate women, I hate black people, gay people, Muslims, Catholics in Ireland and the UK, the opponents of Catholicism everywhere else (I honestly can't quite figure that one out), the old, the sick, children, teachers, nurses, immigrants, Jews, Arabs, Scots, and, yes, Britain. Any right-winger will tell you that these slurs are so routine that they've become mundane. Mark Steyn and PJ O'Rourke joke about them. We shrug them off, because they're so ordinary they've just become background noise.
So it was interesting to read today a large number of left-wingers claiming that to accuse someone with whose politics one vehemently disagrees of hating Britain is completely unprecedented, that doing this crosses some new line of political indecency that no-one has ever crossed before. Really, it doesn't. From Left to Right, this slur happens a hundred times a day. If it's really so shockingly unprecedented in the other direction (and this isn't just a load of feigned outrage), what does that tell us?
