Peter Wood, on the ongoing political theatrics of the left:

My account of how New Anger came bubbling up in Chait’s 2003 article like the Texas crude in Jeb Clampit’s swamp, probably does not correspond with Chait’s own view of the matter. In February 2006, when Ken Mehlman had characterized Hillary Clinton as having “a lot of anger,” Chait offered a rebuttal on Hugh Hewitt’s radio interview program. Hillary, he said, “is just the opposite of angry. I think she’s robotic, passionless, dull.” It’s a revealing statement. Some might think the “opposite of angry” would be warm, friendly, and engaging. But New Anger casts anger as an altogether enlivening force, so that the “opposite” of anger becomes lifelessness: robotic, passionless, and dull. Fortunately for George Washington, when we had a new republic, we didn’t have Chait’s version of The New Republic. What Washington’s contemporaries commended as his dignified self-control, would by these lights, be a woeful lack of zesty anger.

In that interview, Chait went on to say that, “The whole notion of anger [in politics] is just weird and misplaced.” Hewitt, noticing that Chait seemed to be disavowing the notion and applying it at the same time, pressed him, and Chait added that he didn’t let his feelings get in the way of his being “cool and rational in analyzing what Bush does.” He distinguished his own emotion from the “rage” he saw among Republicans. Hewitt then read back to him the opening of “I hate President George W. Bush,” and succeeded in getting only Chait’s tepid admission that his language “might” have sounded like anger.

Remember the really weird and pathetic drama "thirtysomething"?

The angry ones are these guys that have been through all those traumas and are still feeling empty. To feel full, they get angry because happiness is beyond their comprehension.

Lefist:angry
Rightist:hate filled

So, to liberals (e.g., Chait) and the Left, angry=passion?

Is the opposite also true, then? Is passion=anger?

This is extraordinary, since neither is true (or, more precisely, anger is a passion, but hardly the same as passion-writ-large.

More to the point, while Martin Luther King, Jr. was passionate, as were Susan B. Anthony, John Adams, and Mohandas Gandhi, one would be hardpressed to describe them as "angry" (or at least to argue that this was the dominant emotion for any of them).

Seems like yet another twisting of the English language, to me.