While Democrats have surely had their share of politicians who live on the dark side of civility, it's by far the Republican party, following the advice of people like Lee "Darth Vader" Atwater and his acolyte Karl Rove, and egged on by Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and their ilk, who brought negative campaigning, the politics of personal destruction, and the permanent campaign (which replaced the goal of proper governance with winning elections) to the depths it has reached today, when anything and everything -- smear campaigns, push polling, blatant and outrageous lies, associating your opponent with the enemy and calling them traitors, religious defamation, voter suppression, the misapplication of law, and the abuse of foreign policy for selfish political goals -- is used without qualm to crush your political opponent.

Today, in a post about ABC's journalmalism about negative campaigning, where explicit examples of Republican/right-wing misbehavior is "balanced" with a statement, presented without any evidence whatsoever, that the Democrats (referred to as "the left" -- HAH!) are probably doing it too, Kevin Drum agrees:

Sure, neither party is simon pure, but Tapper and McCown know perfectly well that the nauseating and polarized nature of modern American politics is almost entirely a Republican invention. From Lee Atwater to Rush Limbaugh to Newt Gingrich to Ken Starr to Tom DeLay to the Rove/Bush/Cheney machine, the Republican Party has pioneered a scorched-earth approach to politics that Democrats have never come close to matching. Their destruction of congressional traditions in the service of power has gone immensely farther than anything Democrats did when they were in power. Their deliberate and single-minded fealty to K Street lobbyists makes Democrats look like pikers.

Exactly the case, and yet another example of how phoney "balance" in a news story creates a misimpression which helps to perpetuate political urban legends, such as that there's no difference between Democrats and Republicans (pace Ralph Nader, may he rest in well-deserved obscurity). That this disinformation is useful primarily to the right-wing is not, I think, a coincidence.

Balance is good, when all sides of a controversy are examined, all leads are followed, all precepts are questioned, all statements cross-examined. Such balance helps to uncover facts and let us see reality as clearly as we can. "Balance" is another thing altogether: it's crock of shit. It warps our minds and veils reality from us. It serves those who must hold power through lies and propaganda and can't survive in the light of the day.

People who write "balanced" stories, whatever their personal politics or however nice or pleasant they are, do us a great disservice, and bear some measure of responsibility for the mess we're in.

Update (10/28): Glenn Greenwald has more on the subject of "balance":

And therein lies the gravest illness of modern journalism -- the refusal on the part of people like Kurtz to report on matters honestly and factually. When reporters have as their central mandate that they must criticize each side equally -- even if doing so causes them to report on matters dishonestly -- it encourages one side to sink as low as possible, to be as deceitful, corrupt and dishonorable as possible, because the media will never report that fact and will never identify the guilty side as doing anything different than the other side. In the world of Howie Kurtz, both sides are always equal and identical and the same, even when they aren't. [Emphasis added -- Ed]