Brad DeLong and others are having a lot of good clean fun ridiculing pundits who insisted, to the last, that their psychic guts perceived truths invisible to pollsters. And who knows? This ridicule may even serve a social purpose, making news organizations a bit less likely to treat these pundits as fonts of wisdom.

But I think there’s something else that needs discussing. The rejection of polling evidence wasn’t just a matter of wishful thinking on the right; it was accompanied by intense rage. (Just look at my comment thread here, which now stands as a sort of historical marker of the lunacy of the campaign’s closing days — and you should have seen the stuff that didn’t make it through moderation!)

On the face of it, this makes no sense. The election was going to happen, and somebody was going to win. Why lash out so bitterly at people who you claimed to think would be revealed as fools in just a couple of days?

I’ll try to present some more coherent thoughts on a later occasion, but here’s my quick take: what we’ve just seen is a peek into the modern right-wing psyche, which is obsessed — more than anything else — with power. Policy is one thing; but equally or even more important is the sense of being with the winners, of being part of the team that will stamp its boots on the faces of the other guys. And while conservatives of that ilk would probably concede if pressed on it that there’s a difference between the perception of being on top and the reality determined in an election, emotionally they can’t separate the two: they perceive anyone suggesting that maybe they aren’t going to smash their opponents as a threat.

And we’re not just talking about teenagers blogging in their pajamas; look at Karl Rove’s temper tantrum on Fox.

I’m tempted to say that all the people who went wild over skewed polls, Nate Silver is evil, and so on need to seek counseling. But if I were to say that, this would even drive them crazier. So I won’t. Oh, wait.