Cornered, frightened animals tend to bite and claw and fight back at whatever has backed them into a corner. Senator Zell Miller, in his speech last night, backed Andrew Sullivan, Matthew Yglesias, as quintessential examples for so many others) into a corner and forced their mouths to foam.

Yggy certainly warps the idea of a “Jacksonian” American by describing the principle as “racism-infused militarism and casual disregard for the US constitution,” maybe by hearkening to the Indian-killer and hothead image, the same image (minus the Indian-killer part, of course) that infused the Democrats with a history of “feeling” and “passion.” There surely were plenty of Jacksonian Democrats post-9/11. Were they racism-infused militarists too?

Andrew Sullivan, on the other hand, successfully calls Zell Miller an Angry White Man while at the same time not understanding one word of English. Where in his speech was the substance of Thurmond’s lament that “there are not enough troops in the army to force southern people to admit the negroes into our theatres, swimming pools and homes?” Nowhere, unless all you can get from the speech is the timbre of his voice and the cadence of his diction. I got chills when I realized that the throwback to “black-and-white, archived video of election campaigns past” with which I described his speech last night was actually evoked by a similarity to how Thurmond sounded with his “swimming pools” speech.

Nowhere, nowhere in Zell Miller’s speech did a legacy of racism—despite the man’s history—show itself, and this is just another case of cognitive dissonance where people who cannot handle what Miller dished out last night continue to box at the shadows of irrefutible facts.

I just spent the past few paragraphs simply to say that the tried and true tactic of firing argumentums ad hominem, one after another, is the only response left to Andrew Sullivan and his ilk at a time like this.

Related commentary: John Cole rips into Andy for his bigotry. Ace Of Spades (HT: Mike Hendrix) picks him apart.

[First in a series of post-Miller convention-related commentary today.]