Stop. Breathe. Read.

My biggest problem with Aravosis is he turns differences of opinion about strategy into personal attacks on the Obama administration. It's fine to disagree with the approach the White House has taken, but to call Obama a sell out just because he takes a different approach than Avarosis would, or to say he doesn't want real reform, or whatever, is wrong and unhelpful. He did the same thing to Hillary Clinton during the primaries: He constantly attacked her motives rather than simply expressing disagreement. We need to stop attacking our own and start working with Obama and the Democrats (the real Democrats, anyway) to develop a better strategy moving forward. It shouldn't be about an individual blogger's ability to take the president down; it should be about getting back on the right track.

And, in case you haven’t been on Twitter lately, our good friends on the left are doing the same thing over this so-called spending freeze, which isn’t a freeze. They all pounced on Obama without knowing what he was actually proposing, and when the truth came out they just doubled-down. I hope our fellow lefties are prepared to deal with President Romeny in 2012. I’m sure not looking forward to it.

Aravosis was just plain wrong, and his article was unintentionally — or intentionally — inflammatory. He succeeded in scaring the bejeezus out of a bunch of unthinking, partially-literate, and reactive children ranging from 20 to 80 years in age.

In fact, I'm totally flipped out after reading the lame, unintelligent, unthinking, alarmist, childish, infantile, and totally illogical comments that so many wrote in response to Aravosis' erroneous article.

Even worse, I'm embarrassed by those comments. Why?

1. Some are just plain unintelligent. Whether the writers sound stupid because they're lazy, or truly limited in intellect, I don't know.

2. Some are self-indulgent temper tantrums, raging against absolutely nothing (much like tantrums in 2-year-olds who inexplicably go into hysterics for no apparent reason).

3. Some are intentionally provoking people who are (a) unable to read very well, or (b) unable to conduct the light research required to make sense of Aravosis' panicky claims, or (c) intentionally misunderstanding the clarifications written so articulately and clearly by Karoli.

For a long time, I've been concerned about attacks against liberals/progressives who critique Obama and/or his actions. Democracy requires informed dissent. As long as criticism focused on policy, rather than on alleged motivations and character flaws, critique can be constructive. It potentially helps refine thinking, which often leads to more finessed actions and policies.

But there isn't one iota of “informed dissent” in 95% of the comments made in response to Aravosis' most unfortunate article. There's nothing but panic, rage, slander, innuendo, willful disregard for facts, stupidity, fear, impulsive spewing of barely coherent language, and destructive emotion.

Now I understand why Karoli, Shoq, and many others have been so frustrated and angry at criticism of Obama and/or his policies. It's because much of the criticism is unfounded, invalid, overstated, speculative, bigoted, and inflammatory. In fact, I'm having difficulty telling the difference between the rhetoric of many radical right-wing populists (the so-called “teabaggers,”) and the rhetoric of many radical left-wing populists. Most of it sounds insane, frankly. Most of it has no basis in reality, and is unthinking, uncaring catharsis.

We don't need catharsis, kids. This is not a mid-1960s Esalen therapy group, where you replay the enraged infant who didn't “get everything he/she wanted” by screaming obscenities and unfiltered, regressive emotion at the top of your lungs.

We need intelligence, open-minded discourse, informed dissent, a concerted effort to find commonalities, and the adult ability to work pragmatically toward the principled goals I believe we all share.