If you want to learn to overcome fear -- I mean if you want to master cold, stark terror -- don't bother with bungee jumping or mountain skating or other extreme sports. Turn on your modem and go extremist surfing.

It's a chilling glimpse into a world that readers of this blog are unlikely to have encountered before -- a world ruled by the conservative values of hate, intolerance and contempt.

To be honest, I don't even remember how I came to traverse this alien landscape. You know how it is on the Web: you view a site, click on one of its links, click on another link, then another, and suddenly you're a stranger in a strange land.

That's how I happened upon Liberty News Forum, a venom-filled hate-fest with a dedicated core of terminally bitter posters. As I'm sure you'll understand, I couldn't resist registering and countering some of their more rabid rants with a post of my own: an article from the Guardian/UK, featured in my Sept. 4 post.

Which is when all hell broke loose.

I was attacked. My mother was attacked. The Democratic party was attacked. Liberals were attacked. The Guardian was attacked. Its reporter was attacked. England was attacked.

Completely ignored, however, was the content of the article -- allegations that George H.W. Bush had used his influence in 1972 to get his son transferred to the Alabama National Guard because of "drunken and occasionally loutish" behavior. (Bush Sr., then our ambassador to the UN, apparently felt that his son was an embarrassment.)

But no one wanted to discuss the article, which will soon be buttressed by a report on 60 Minutes. No one could muster an argument that didn't depend on my supposed anti-Americanism. I got in some good shots, as you'd expect of your favorite blogger, and challenged them to address the issues instead of the identity of my real father, but to no avail. Before long, my account was canceled and my IP address was banished forever.

So much for liberty in the Liberty News Forum.

But that was just the beginning of my adventures as the Accidental Liberal Tourist. Two days later I stumbled into the Free Republic.

Let me be your Zagat's guide on this one, friends; this forum makes patrolling the Mekong Delta in a Swift Boat look like a stint in the Texas Guard.

Here I had the audacity to post another article, regarding documents suspiciously missing from Bush's military records, just to see how long before the piranhas swarmed.

It took less than a minute.

Let me note here that I had posted the article without comment in the news section of the forum. But every time I refreshed the page, there were vicious new assaults on me, the Associated Press, and pretty much anyone without a gun collection.

It was astounding. Numbing. Terrifying. Although, on the plus side, I can say I experienced shell-shock with no obvious permanent damage.

The hate was brutally pure, distilled into the essence of contempt. And I realized, for the first time, the magnitude of the threat these people pose to the freedoms they claim to cherish. They know what they think they know, they know they despise everyone else, and they're happy about it. (Well, as happy as rage-aholics can get.) Even the mildest conflicting information is propaganda; if a videotape surfaced of Bush beating Brownies in the Oval Office, citizens of the Free Republic would say it was a conspiracy of the liberal media, the Girl Scouts of America and the company that made the camcorder.

Think DeNiro in Taxi Driver. Think Michael Douglas in Falling Down. Think squalid apartments with powerful computers. These people live in a world of their own, filled with fear and loathing. Which would be fine, and harmless -- kind of like an all-Klingon subculture of Trekkies. Except for one problem.

They're going to vote in November. And if a proud progressive like me could stumble into their mudpit, what of some alienated 21st-Century Travis Bickle -- lonely, bitter, drifting -- who discovers, late one night, that hate can give you something to live for?

I escaped. (Actually, the gatekeepers of the "Free" Republic terminated my account within 15 minutes of my one post.) But if a Travis-type had posted the same article with only a brief negative comment -- something like, "the pro-Kerry media are at it again!" -- he would have been welcomed warmly into the tribe.

Go see for yourself. The sites are linked above. Read a few posts, register, try to say something that isn't an insult or attack. And watch as bloody chunks of your flesh are flayed off your bones.

Then, when they bar your IP address, go to a different computer.