There seems to be an element of social bonding there as well, something you can see when you find newsgroup threads that are celebrating a Palin hatefest.
Another thing that makes me think is the schoolyard bully routine that this inspires too, this Palin obsession is sort of like a test if you are in ‘our gang’.
It would be interesting how much mutual hate pep talk was practiced by those people in their social groups before they decided that liking Sarah Palin is akin to something terrible, like (say) cannibalism ie something that justifies (and demands!) a strong social exclusion reaction like the ones displayed and a high aggression situation is voluntarily entered without there being an emergency situation. This kind of hysterical reaction is culturally quite alien to many western people.
As for how to deal with a Palin hater?
Remove them from your environment at the earliest opportunity — compliment the out of the door, walk away, sack them if they work for you, split up if they are your partner… anyone who obsesses to this degree is like an unexploded bomb — you don’t know what their unbridled aggression will put them up to in the future, but what you found out is that they are capable of going mad in an ungood way. Whoever it is, they are not a good person to know, the fundamentals of their personality are not sound.
