Observation: When conservatives/rightists have died or fallen seriously ill and we have posted brief obit or well-wishing notes on our center-right blog Stubborn Facts, we have ALMOST ALWAYS had to remove some truly nasty comments to conform with our policy of not ****ing on the freshly dead before they are buried*. MOST of those comments went well beyond not just the boundaries of decorum but also those of factual record, into babbling hateful tin-foil land.

We have never had that problem with the short obits or well-wishing notes posted for those on the left, such as Congresswoman Tubbs Jones or other prominent leftie pols such as Ted Kennedy.

Your own mileage as to why this is, though personally I favor the "New Anger" hypothesis.
 
[*--even our posts on the death of Saddam Hussein were brief and non-celebratory. Yes, we are consistent, though I can't guarantee that we will be so restrained with, say, bin Laden or Castro...but we might.]

From a moral perspective, too, I think it’s always important to acknowledge that just about every human being is capable of good as well as bad choices and actions; by focusing on the good that people have done instead of parts of their life which we might consider bad, we distinguish between such people and those who have truly dedicated their entire lives to evil.

Instead of being a distortion, the focus on the good inherent in most everyone is actually a more balanced view of human nature because if we refrain from the hyperbolic reaction to a person’s ‘bad’ actions, we leave room to acknowledge that there are and have been some people who have chosen evil and perpetuated acts that were evil throughout their lives.

Suffice to say that I’ve heard a similar analysis of conservatives made by the Left that Jason has made of liberals.

I’ve heard such but can only relate my own experience and observations. No one expects to find compassion for "the enemy" in the fever swamps of either side. (Of course, no one should expect to find any rationality or good will in the fever swamps either.)

I will still refrain from pissing on the warm bodies of the recently deceased. If one cannot resist the urge, one can at least hold it in long enough to piss on their cold graves instead….after the mourners leave.

Tom, I’m with Jason on this one.  No, I haven’t conducted anything that would be considered to be a statistically valid sample for a survey, but I think my observations over many years on college and university campuses bear out his contention -that the left is routinely less civil in its treatment of those it disagrees with than the right.  Perhaps part of this may be attributable to youthful excitement and enthusiasm, and that is a fair point.  But only to a point, because many faculty engage in the sort of behavior we are alluding to here. 

When Hinkley shot President Reagan, I was in an academic department office - and a middle aged professor, who is otherwise a decent and kind husband and father remarked with great venom, "Goddammit, how could the son-of-a-bitch miss at that range! Shit, we’re stuck with that moron of a VP if the old asshole dies."  No one was likely to see too many right of center articles, political cartoons and the like posted in faculty offices, or on their doors, but I can recall seeing several of the once obligatory posters of Che as recently as a couple of years ago. 

The whole business with the attempt to railroad the Duke lacrosse team wasn’t undertaken by students, but by their professors - middle aged people who one would like to think would know better.  Now, Tom, to your point - yes, there ARE some honest and honorable people on the left.  One of them is Robert "KC" Johnson whose blog "Durham in Wonderland" and the book he co-authored helped turn the tide and derail Mike Niong’s train before it ran over the athletes.  But if you look carefully at postings on many academic blogs, there are a lot of people who attack the few honorable leftists like Johnson who defended the rights of the accused to have genuine due process and complain that by defending the players, he’s working for the racist, sexist enemy.  Because many of them make no secret that they believe that white, straight males are the enemy. 

Tony Snow’s last scheduled speaking engagement had to be canceled, because, as it turned out, he was dying.  That was scheduled in my state.  And on my campus, the remarks from the faculty, in the faculty lunch room, were overwhelmingly rude.  In fact, most of them would have been considered exceptionally bigoted had they been addressed to a woman, person of color, or homosexual.  But no one saw anything unreasonable about them because Tony Snow had been part of the ‘enemy.’ 

I’m sure it has been said many time.  Once again, try this experiment:  Listen to what the folks around you are saying about Tony Snow, or  Jesse Helms, or President bush - and try saying the same words but change the name to Barack Obama, and see if it remains acceptable.  If its offensive, maybe its offensive regardless of whom you are saying it about. 

The concept of ‘delegitimizing the enemy’ is and old one - really its pure tribalism.  Think Rwanda, or what we’re seeing hints of in South Ossetia and the rest of Georgia, or parts of the Middle East.  Defining people who are not exactly like you as sub-human, and therefore killable without compunction.  But I have to say the left has been much more willing to do this than the right for the past century.  Read _The Black Book of Communism_ and compare the figures of the communists with the deaths caused by the fascists on the right.  There’s no comparison which ideology has killed more, and which continues to kill more.  Hint:  Franco, Allende and the right are pikers compared to the big killers. 

I don’t spend much time reading the fringe blogs.  But I find it interesting that KOS is considered an acceptable mainstream left blog, and it has regularly had comments calling for the killing of right of center politicians like President Bush and Vice President Cheney, admittedly couched in terms of executions for ‘war crimes,’ and no one seems to see this as anti-social behavior.  But let someone make a snide remark about Obama’s association with a racially motivated pastor or his association with a couple of convicted terrorists like Ayers and Dohrn,  and this is seen as proof of racism and sexism.  Please!  Spare me the sob story. 

The notion that we have the best of intentions for mankind are pretty universal.  the problem is, when you define those who disagree with you as evil, it makes any sort of compromise or discussion impossible.  And while I can not see any way to justify the killing in Rwanda, I think it is a terrible failing to connote differences of opinion about matter such as availability of day care, funding for health care programs with genocide.  And calling  the decision to go to war in Iraq genocidal or criminal is a misuse of both terms in an effort to stake a claim to moral high ground.  This is no different than the religious right declaring that abortion is genocide.  We hear too much hyperbole from extremists.  Unfortunately, I would have to agree with the opening post’s premise - the left, more than the right, is engaging in dehumanizing speech about the people it disagrees with, and treats them as less than human.  That’s one man’s observation.  Your mileage may vary. 

Thanks for reading

OTOH, there is enough hate on both sides to go around. The right always pretends that this is a one-sided phenomenon.

Otherwise, Rush would have no audience and Anne Coulter’s books would languish in the discount pile, instead of consistently making the NYT’s bestseller list!

Well, then maybe its just a coincidence that the majority of your posts tend to frame it to indicate that there’s a difference in reactions between left and right, with the most aggregious,extreme behavior occuring on the left of course. Its natural to notice it more when its the OTHER side that’s committing the infractions.

I do remember that during the Clinton years some wanted the Clintons charged with murder for the death of Vincent Foster.

And is this really a case of "cultural deficiency" or a reaction to the incumbent administration?  The Bush administration is as unpopular with the Left as the Clinton administration was with the Right (though Bush has had considerably lower approval ratings than Clinton).  Is the reaction by the Left really any surprise, given the circumstances?