For years, radical liberals (of the Daily Kos and MoveOn.org variety) lobbed four-letter words and death threats at President Bush. Now, suddenly, these same commentators are wildly concerned about the hate and intolerance directed toward President-elect Obama.

The local tie-in would be the spat over graffiti on the free expression tunnel at N.C. State (Rick Martinez has some enlightening thoughts on that here). The comments scribbled on the tunnel were wrong, but the test of freedom of political speech is not whether one can tolerate agreeable sentiments but disagreeable. I guess liberals didn’t find this disagreeable enough to call for a lawsuit against the perpetrators. I wonder why.

Now we have an AP story devoted to discussing the rise in “hate crimes” thanks to Obama’s rise to the presidency. I don’t recall an AP story about the Palin lynching being a “hate crime” since she is a woman. That’s too much to ask, I guess.

In any event, Bill Croke has a good piece in The American Spectator today about the Left’s obsession with verbal threats against the president-elect. In this case, the “threats” came from grade-schoolers in Rexburg, Idaho. From the beginning of the piece:

The day after Election Day some grade-schoolers on the bus were heard to be chanting in singsong “Assassinate Obama.” When bored with that, they switched to “Assassinate Obama and Kate” (poor little Kate, whoever she might be, but her presence does illustrate the episode’s trivial nature). Anyway, the bus driver overheard this, and some parents got wind of it secondhand from their kids. In short, the Madison County School District was notified. An official e-mail was sent to all administrators, teachers and bus drivers stating this behavior should be met with strong disapproval. News of the scandal reached a Twin Falls TV news station, which devoted a short segment to it. It seems that due to the kids’ ages (six to eight) that the United States Secret Service wasn’t interested. But Jill Kuraitis was. More