When the tea parties were going strong last summer, we heard lots of complaints from the left about this new threat to civility. Nancy Pelosi warned about protesters "carrying swastikas." Brian Baird fretted about "brownshirt tactics."

Now amid all the calls for civility, local lefty blogger/former KIRO talk-host David Goldstein steps into action. Warning: do not click if you are eating, or have just eaten. Wowser, is that a 'brown pant tactic?' The Seattle Times, reliably liberal though it is, is not liberal enough for Goldy.

This is no isolated incident from Seattle's left wing contingent. Remember when Dan Savage of The Stranger related how he volunteered for the campaign of Gary Bauer and tried to infect Bauer and his staff with the flu? Savage himself describes his actions:

"I go around the room licking doorknobs. They are filthy, no doubt, but there isn't time to find a rag to spit on. If for some reason I don't manage to get a pen from my mouth to Gary's hands at the conference, I want to seed his office with germs, get as many of his people sick as I can, and hopefully one of them will infect the candidate. I lick office doorknobs, bathroom doorknobs. When that's done, I start on the staplers, phones, and computer keyboards. Then I stand in the kitchen and lick the rims of all the clean coffee cups drying in the rack. I grab my coat and head out. "

Other examples are not hard to find. There was the time a mob of lefty cyclists beat up a motorist and trashed his car. The sick threats against Stefan Sharkansky after a lefty waitress got herself canned from her job. The pie shoved in the face of Tim Eyman with such force that it sent him to the hospital. Etc.

It may be that I am just too unsophisticated to understand the subtlety and complexity of the lefty mind. Like that notorious rube Sarah Palin, and unlike Goldy, I do not posess the refinement afforded by an Ivy League education.