It’s war! Only days after Rick Perry jumped into the race, the Left worked itself into a frenzy of loathing — over his boots, hair, drawl and his devotion to God and his pistol, but mainly over their unrelieved horror that men such as he are allowed to exist.

Calling it pique understates the emotion: It’s not his ideas, it is Perry himself who offends them. And it’s really an old sort of reheated loathing, warmed over from last time, or perhaps from the time before that.