• 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.



• It's also obvious that people who hold beliefs that 40 years ago would never have been heard outside a meeting of the John Birch Society now control the Republican Party with an iron fist, and through it the Federal government, while people whose views are equally extreme on the other side don't have any representation within the Democratic party, and liberals and progressives (who are not extremists at all, but a long-established part of the mainstream of American society) have to fight unceasingly just for a seat at the table and consideration of their views.

The right has for so many years and with great insistence complained about liberal bias in the media, deliberately conflated liberalism with communism, and branded anything remotely progressive as dangerous and un-American, that these ideas have been absorbed into the zeitgeist, so that mainstream commentators (who really ought to know better because they lived through the same stuff that I did) accept them as gospel without perhaps even understanding that they have, or realizing what ill-begotten assumptions they represent. I suppose to them these things come to seem like nuggets of common sense wisdom that helpfully sum up reality in a nutshell, instead of seeing them for what they are: smears, lies, misperceptions, ideologically-based propaganda, and distilled hatred.