In this winter of the Left’s discontent, a brand new and highly contagious seasonal disorder is spreading across the state. Fortunately, the bug is not spread by casual contact. In fact, anyone who follows such basic precautions as not drinking the Kool-Aid brewed by Maine’s chattering classes in the liberal media shouldn’t have to worry about being infected.

Symptoms of LePage Derangement Syndrome include delusional thinking, hyper-ventilation, and self-righteous chest-thumping.

A weekly newspaper columnist with a bad case of LDS recently tried to morph the new governor into Archie Bunker. Get it? It’s an indirect way of calling Gov. Paul LePage a racist bigot.

Another columnist who worked for Gov. John Baldacci declared that LePage is no racist. Then the writer amended his assessment: “At least not in any classical sense of the word.” How’s that for a clever backhand? He went on to say that LePage has surrounded himself with a “small circle of mostly older white men.” This cheap-shot indictment by innuendo is typical of how the professional Left plays racial politics.

Facts and context are the best antidotes to the infection.

Fact: Paul LePage had already politely declined the NAACP’s invitation to attend their Martin Luther King Day function when he made his now famous “kiss my butt” remark. Days after he declined the invitation, a reporter asked him how he would respond to the charge that his decision not to attend is part of a pattern. The clear implication of the hypothetical question was that LePage’s unwillingness to pay homage to the NAACP makes him insufficiently progressive on race issues.

Let’s be clear about this: the NAACP is a partisan, left-wing pressure group that uses race as a wedge issue in election campaigns. How quickly have we forgotten the disgusting and despicable radio and TV ads the NAACP sponsored 10 years ago, linking candidate George W. Bush to the murder of James Byrd in Texas?

No reasonable observer really believes the NAACP is interested in reducing racial tensions. The organization is defined today in terms of its commitment to affirmative action and minority set-asides, but can’t seem to find its voice to condemn the ghetto culture of violence and fatherless children that holds minorities back. So it’s refreshing to have a governor who won’t be bullied into paying homage to these purveyors of identity politics.

In fact, ground zero for the outbreak of LePage Derangement Syndrome may have been the revocation of Maine’s “sanctuary” status on LePage’s first day in office. The Maine NAACP had lobbied vigorously to make Maine a haven for illegals, and Gov. Baldacci obediently signed an executive order in 2004 forbidding state employees from asking welfare applicants if they were in the country legally. With the stroke of his pen, LePage returned some small measure of sanity to state government.

The Left is still in shock over this abrupt reality check.

Finally, no discussion of LDS symptoms would be complete without noting the shameless hypocrisy exhibited by those infected. Victims of the syndrome stubbornly refuse to demand the same standard of civility from liberals that they demand from conservatives.

A school teacher claimed that she and her colleagues spend every working day trying to teach adolescents to be kind to one another and to speak to one another with decency. She wrote: “With one off-the-cuff remark, the governor has undermined all our hard work.”

Where was she, may I ask, when the president of the United States told a reporter last year that he was determined to find out “whose ass to kick” in the wake of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? Or when he made fun of the Special Olympics? Recall too that when he was campaigning for office, he said that “if they (the Republicans) bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” More recently, he referred to Republicans in Congress as “hostage-takers.”

Examples of hate speech by liberals are legion, from “jokes” about Sarah Palin’s daughter being raped at Yankee Stadium, to calls for death by stoning of conservatives and their families. These ugly incitements to violence caused no discernible ripple of concern from folks who are now hyper-ventilating over Paul LePage dissing a pressure group that rarely misses an opportunity to divide Americans along racial lines.

Take the cure, folks. Chill out, face the facts, and lose that double standard. You’ll feel better in the morning.

Larry Lockman of Amherst is a legislative research analyst whose guest columns have appeared in Maine newspapers for more than 30 years.