I've come late to the party, and Gregor, your comment is the first one since the beginning that directly addresses what Jason was demonstrating.

Jason has a point, but I think it treats both sides as independent actors in a vacuum. It ignores the interaction between the liberals and the conservatives. The liberals try to be fact-based; the conservatives tend to be authority-based. Facts are more likely to work with the reality of the various situations being discussed.

What has happened is that the conservatives really do feel oppressed and with the advent of the conservative movement they adopted the ideas of john C. Calhoun and the tactics of the John Birch Society. That includes attacking liberals without addressing the fact-based substance of many of the liberal positions. The attacks are more likely to be propaganda than arguments based in facts, and they have been the major practitioners of the politics of personal destruction since they are presenting authority-based arguments that rarely jib with objective facts.

The liberals find themselves being beaten by people who don't follow the rules, the appointment of Bush in 2000 and the Supreme Court refusing to permit real investigation of the facts (the votes)being a prime example.

People who are regularly attacked and who can see themselves being marginalized, as the liberals have over the last 16 years, get angry and attack back in ways much like the methods used by the conservatives. That's where the similarity in what the two sides write comes from.

Conservatives ignore arguments and facts and instead rely on force and power to get their way. That's why they invaded Iraq with no real objective fact based reason. That's also why they consider diplomacy to be a waste of time. They trust superior force and do not believe that diplomats can effectively deal with people who are so different in culture that the conservatives refuse to trust them.

A lot of liberals now consider conservatives to be people you cannot make a deal with, and who are too irrational to try to deal with reasonably.

What kind of rhetoric do you think will come out of both sides under those circumstances?

The conservative rhetoric is primarily based on the force-based "Just say no!" attitude and supported by their refusal to make and keep deals.

Orrin Hatch, Lindsay Graham, and a few other long-time Senators who remember the older traditions of the Senate are clear exceptions to that unwillingness to keep deals they make. They aren't enough to change the dynamic. The rest are playing to the media, the base and the talk show hosts who dominate that base instead of talking to each other and working to solve America's real problems. Some are angry true believers (like the John Birchers of the 60's) and some just are concerned about winning the next election.

Anyway, that's the dynamic I see, and I think it explains the samples Jason presented. Conservatives and liberals are not just each acting out their inherent nature. They are reacting to how they each see the other side is treating them.

Oh and my links, hardly commercial.

You Do know what commercial means, don't you?

Oh, and read my reply to amike. He suggested he would be beaten, not you. I was not talking about you.

Doing my best to stay above the fray most days and as successful as most usually. It just seemed especially obnoxious the last few months.

What I meant to say, was if he were a republican many here would be opening up with both barrels.

You do tend to reserve that sort of stuff for "conservatives" in general rather than specific bloggers here at TPM.

Mea culpa.