Well, clearly, half the country is stupid.

Complete Idiots.

Sound familiar? Yeah, I’ve said it in the past, too, when devastated by election returns.

The problem with politics is that we hold our ideological philosophies so closely, so personally, that we simply cannot conceive how anyone else manages to believe differently. And if they do, well, they’re simply misinformed, uneducated or backwards. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from training horses that applies to the rest of life, it’s this: violence arrives when ability disappears. If a rider (or a parent, teacher, politician or pundit) has to resort to force, whether it comes in the form of a whip or venomous name-calling in an attempt to get their point across, they have lost their intellectual ability, if they’ve ever had it.

The electronic age has brought us the potential of so much good and, also, seething negativity. That is, however, not an excuse to abandon our personal choice of working to the height of our collective intellectual capabilities.

In 2008, because I was the only left-leaning radio host in all the Carolinas, I was asked to appear several times on CNN’s ‘This American Morning’ because the state of North Carolina appeared to be turning blue and producers were interested in what my listeners thought about this development. After explaining that most of my particular listeners were more interested in calling in with made up items for our comedic interpretation of ‘Swap and Shop,’ I gave a detailed answer that affordable health care seemed to be on their minds and, as they were struggling with lay-offs and an economy that was collapsing around their ears, they didn’t see how McCain’s proposed tax cuts would help them afford anything when the annual average price of health insurance for a family of four was $12,000.

When I arrived back home from the television studio, my email box was completely jammed with comments from all over America and, a few, from overseas. CNN attracts a liberal audience so, naturally, there were quite a few, “Atta girls” and “Thank you for explaining this issue so thoroughly” but also some amazingly vicious replies: “You stupid lib!” and “You and your idiot candidate is going down!”

Now, let me just say right here that I am absolutely positive that had I held the opposite view, that universal health care would be the financial ruin of our country, I would have received equally scathing replies from the left.