A parent who should not be a parent

A rather stunning and disturbing Virginia letter to the editor:

We had an interesting experience at Clifton Day this year. Myself, my 11-year-old son and a friend were walking up the street in the big crowd when we encountered Mrs. George Allen and her entourage. [...] Here is the exchange:
Mrs. Allen: "I am Mrs. George Allen."
My son: "You suck."
Me: "She's Mrs. Macaca."
Mrs. Allen: "Oooooo, don't teach your children to hate."
Me: "Teach your children to think. (We chant) Stop the corruption."
And she was whisked away by her handlers. [...] I have never been more proud of my son. We are teaching respect on a case-by-case basis, not on arbitrary parameters having to do with social position or age. The main thrust of this experience is this: We are starting to hate [...] [I]t's sad but politics is no longer a polite cocktail hour conversation.

Wow, I'm not even sure where to start here. This is a woman who is so consumed with hate that she's taught her child to express hate and insult adults in the most vile manner...and she's proud of it! And in a bizarre bit of projection she complains that politics can no longer be discussed politely!

This is disturbing on so many levels. It's one thing to rage on an online political forum, where such irrational, overheated rhetoric is expected, each post trying to one-up the shock value of the previous entries. It's quite another to send such a missive to a newspaper.

But once you've been brainwashed into thinking that this sort of behavior is acceptable in public, you've really crossed a boundary. At that point you're so emotionally disturbed that you have no place in polite society and should seek therapy. From this point, you're baby steps from turning to violence against the subjects of your ire with possibly tragic consequences for yourself or others.

This idiot acts as if being whisked away by handlers when faced with somebody who is apparently mentally ill and possibly armed is a bad thing. I would have been getting the hell out of there if I was even within earshot, much less the one being accosted.

And to pass this kind of bahavior on to an 11 year old is just incomprehensible. Sometimes it might seem as if those who claim that our culture is losing its way are overstating their case, but then you see something like this and you realize that, if anything, they might be selling it short.